Nicola Acutt, VP, Sustainabilty Strategy, VMware, talks with Lisa Martin at VMware Radio 2019 in San Francisco, CA.
#radio2019 #VMware #theCUBE
https://siliconangle.com/2019/05/22/good-tech-the-push-for-cleaner-greener-technology-guestoftheweek/
Good tech: The push for cleaner, greener technology
“Tech for good” is trending these days. Amazon Web Services Inc. and other technology companies are increasingly combining tech and social initiatives. There is also “good tech” — technology built with sustainability and environmental concerns in mind.
Among the companies investing in environmentally conscious tech are VMware Inc. It’s cleaning up after itself, reducing its carbon footprint and encouraging its users to do the same. Sustainability has become a priority in its design and innovation strategy.
“We think of sustainability as … the ability to endure over time,” said Nicola Acutt (pictured), vice president of sustainability strategy at VMware. “It has environmental dimensions, it has social dimensions, and of course it has economic dimensions.”
Acutt spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent RADIO event in San Francisco. They discussed VMware’s commitment to engineering for the environment (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)
This week, theCUBE spotlights Nicola Acutt in our Guest of the Week feature.
Do you know your carbon score?
The company does not simply want to neaten up its environmental stance around the edges. It actually wants to innovate new technologies that don’t treat sustainability as an afterthought, but rather bake it in from the beginning.
“We really do believe that solving many of the sustainability challenges in the world today is about innovation, and so we’re really excited to be able to do that work and to pursue that mission in the office of the CTO,” Acutt stated.
VMware also wants its products to help customers reach their own sustainability goals.
An example of VMware’s efforts comes in the form of the Carbon Awareness Meter it just announced at RADIO. It’s a new product feature in the company’s Skyline proactive support platform. Available later this year, CAM will give customers near real-time carbon scores and provide them with extra information on what’s taking place in their infrastructure that may contribute to less-then-ideal scores.
The feature gives them insight into things like virtual-machine density, how to optimize their hardware, and the grid that their data center operates on. “That then, we hope, will empower … our huge customer base to think about what they can do possibly as a result,” Acutt said.
Another example is a practical project that directly addresses existing environmental pollution. Its parent company, Dell EMC, is using VMware Blockchain in its Ocean Plastics project. VMware Blockchain is VMware’s simplified blockchain service. There are over 5 trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans today, according to some estimates. In fact, some researchers have said there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. Dell has vowed to do its part to prevent that prediction from coming true. It is creating “the first commercial-scale global ocean-bound plastics supply chain,” the company has said. It is processing plastics collected from beaches, waterways and coastal areas and recycling them into new packaging for its XPS 13 2-In-1 laptop globally. The initial pilot project will prevent 16,000 pounds of plastics from making it into the sea.
“That’s just an example of where we’re thinking about applying this lens of sustainability and innovation to our future products, as well as to some of the big challenges we face as a global society,” Acutt said.
Overheated data centers pay it forward
Other technology companies are exploring novel ways to address environmental concerns. The large cloud infrastructure providers run massive data centers. It is not difficult to imagine their drain on the power supply.
“If you look at the growth curve of data centers, you can really see that they will consume more and more power,” Max Schulze, adviser at Vattenfall Group and partner at New Bridge Founders, told theCUBE last December. “The power they consume is not compatible with renewable energy.” These data centers typically require 100% reliable power to run their servers, and that tends to come from non-renewable sources like nuclear plants and coal, he added.
....
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RADIO event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the VMware RADIO 2019 event. Neither VMware Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
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Nicola Acutt, VMware | VMware Radio 2019
Nicola Acutt, VP, Sustainabilty Strategy, VMware, talks with Lisa Martin at VMware Radio 2019 in San Francisco, CA.
#radio2019 #VMware #theCUBE
https://siliconangle.com/2019/05/22/good-tech-the-push-for-cleaner-greener-technology-guestoftheweek/
Good tech: The push for cleaner, greener technology
“Tech for good” is trending these days. Amazon Web Services Inc. and other technology companies are increasingly combining tech and social initiatives. There is also “good tech” — technology built with sustainability and environmental concerns in mind.
Among the companies investing in environmentally conscious tech are VMware Inc. It’s cleaning up after itself, reducing its carbon footprint and encouraging its users to do the same. Sustainability has become a priority in its design and innovation strategy.
“We think of sustainability as … the ability to endure over time,” said Nicola Acutt (pictured), vice president of sustainability strategy at VMware. “It has environmental dimensions, it has social dimensions, and of course it has economic dimensions.”
Acutt spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent RADIO event in San Francisco. They discussed VMware’s commitment to engineering for the environment (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)
This week, theCUBE spotlights Nicola Acutt in our Guest of the Week feature.
Do you know your carbon score?
The company does not simply want to neaten up its environmental stance around the edges. It actually wants to innovate new technologies that don’t treat sustainability as an afterthought, but rather bake it in from the beginning.
“We really do believe that solving many of the sustainability challenges in the world today is about innovation, and so we’re really excited to be able to do that work and to pursue that mission in the office of the CTO,” Acutt stated.
VMware also wants its products to help customers reach their own sustainability goals.
An example of VMware’s efforts comes in the form of the Carbon Awareness Meter it just announced at RADIO. It’s a new product feature in the company’s Skyline proactive support platform. Available later this year, CAM will give customers near real-time carbon scores and provide them with extra information on what’s taking place in their infrastructure that may contribute to less-then-ideal scores.
The feature gives them insight into things like virtual-machine density, how to optimize their hardware, and the grid that their data center operates on. “That then, we hope, will empower … our huge customer base to think about what they can do possibly as a result,” Acutt said.
Another example is a practical project that directly addresses existing environmental pollution. Its parent company, Dell EMC, is using VMware Blockchain in its Ocean Plastics project. VMware Blockchain is VMware’s simplified blockchain service. There are over 5 trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans today, according to some estimates. In fact, some researchers have said there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. Dell has vowed to do its part to prevent that prediction from coming true. It is creating “the first commercial-scale global ocean-bound plastics supply chain,” the company has said. It is processing plastics collected from beaches, waterways and coastal areas and recycling them into new packaging for its XPS 13 2-In-1 laptop globally. The initial pilot project will prevent 16,000 pounds of plastics from making it into the sea.
“That’s just an example of where we’re thinking about applying this lens of sustainability and innovation to our future products, as well as to some of the big challenges we face as a global society,” Acutt said.
Overheated data centers pay it forward
Other technology companies are exploring novel ways to address environmental concerns. The large cloud infrastructure providers run massive data centers. It is not difficult to imagine their drain on the power supply.
“If you look at the growth curve of data centers, you can really see that they will consume more and more power,” Max Schulze, adviser at Vattenfall Group and partner at New Bridge Founders, told theCUBE last December. “The power they consume is not compatible with renewable energy.” These data centers typically require 100% reliable power to run their servers, and that tends to come from non-renewable sources like nuclear plants and coal, he added.
....
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RADIO event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the VMware RADIO 2019 event. Neither VMware Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
