The assessment highlights SoftIron’s capabilities in sustainable IT solutions through its design and manufacturing initiatives. It shows how SoftIron helps its customers reduce carbon footprints through its HyperDrive storage platform. The report claims that the platform’s energy usage is “up to five times smaller than that of equivalent appliances on the market.”
“In comparison to similar data storage and processing appliances available on the market, SoftIron’s product has a greatly reduced carbon footprint mainly on account of comparably low energy usage during operation,” the assessment read.
The report states that for every 10PB of data storage shipped by SoftIron, an estimated 6,656 tonnes of CO2e are saved by reduced energy consumption alone.
To illustrate, this is the equivalent of taking nearly 1,500 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles off the road for a year.
Moreover, the report takes into account the heat reductions SoftIron’s appliances are able to achieve through their reduced energy consumption.
“SoftIron appliances produce up to 80% less heat than the standard, thereby radically reducing emissions pertaining to cooling of data centres,” it noted.
The report also examined the lifespan of SoftIron’s solutions.
“Typical data centre servers have a lifespan of three-five years. As SoftIron’s products use less power and therefore generate less heat during operation, they place less stress on the server (and hard drives) than that of an industry standard appliance, reducing the likelihood of system failure.”
SoftIron solutions only contain the components necessary for its specified function. This means there is less likelihood of a system fault, thus extending the lifespan, the report mentions.
The report deduces that “it is reasonable to assume that SoftIron’s products have a minimum lifespan of five years.”
It lamented that the industry’s practices but lauded SoftIron’s approach to creating optimised solutions that challenge industry norms.
“Many of the industry-standard products adopt a generic model, capable of numerous functions while SoftIron appliances are fully integrated and task-specific such that each appliance only contains the components and processing power necessary for its specified function.”
The assessment also recognised SoftIron’s own efforts to reduce it carbon footprints through its own initiatives including standardising product design, reusing/recycling at manufacturing facilities, reducing software configuration time, installation of a Hot Aisle Containment (HAC) system in its manufacturing facilities, reducing plastic packaging, and its clean supply chain pledge.
It claims that SoftIron’s Edge Manufacturing approach will benefit Australia. It uses digital twin technology to bring efficiencies to IT manufacturing.
“SoftIron is moving towards a model of operation (known as “Edge Manufacturing”) which involves locating manufacturing sites closer to the customer, thereby enabling greater use of local supply chains and reducing emissions pertaining to transportation,” the report explained.
“When we founded SoftIron in 2012, we did it recognising that the industry’s path for manufacturing IT solutions was fundamentally broken for the requirements of the future, both in the core data centre and especially at the edge,” comments SoftIron CEO and co-founder Phil Straw.
“In essence, SoftIron has completely reinvented and modernised how data infrastructure is designed, manufactured and delivered in virtually every regard. The results are solutions that are superior in virtually every way possible, from power draw and heat emissions, to density, and to eliminating vendor lock-in through our use of open source - the list goes on,” claims Straw.
As a member of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, which aims to galvanise the asset management industry to commit to a goal of net zero emissions, Earth Capital produces assessments on all of the companies that it invests in, including SoftIron.
