From bottom line to eco goals: why your data center counts

From sustainability obligations to system reliability and data resilience. The one area that makes a big impact is your data center. Modernizing this area not only checks all these boxes, but it could also save your business millions of dollars. 

But how do you take on the engine room without impacting operations?

Faced with corporate mandates, not to mention an obligation to the future generation, we at Hitachi Vantara took action to transform the inner workings of our Denver data center, replacing an aging infrastructure with more efficient alternatives. All led by an internal team – from concept to execution – with very little oversight. And zero downtime. Not only demonstrating the expertise and technology we have right here under our roof, but also acting as a great educational example and expanding our troubleshooting capabilities for future projects.  

What we did

A whopping 30 racks of legacy storage systems were reduced to just two racks of Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform 5600 systems, leading to:

• A dramatically reduced hardware footprint
• A reduction in CO2 emissions by up to 96%
• 89% less power usage
• 93% less data center space required

We also downsized our server infrastructure from 145 legacy blade servers to 86 Hitachi DS 12/220 servers. This led to a further 40% power reduction, 40% less space and footprint required, and a 22% saving in virtualization licenses.

What we didn’t do

While the public cloud is useful for some systems, for critical systems like our ERP apps we wanted to maintain complete control and guarantee availability. Because of the Hitachi Vantara 100% data availability guarantee, keeping our ERP system on premise ensures reliable computing power and a zero downtime promise that you can’t guarantee with public cloud.

The leap that pays off

The results speak for themselves. With an increase from 63% to 77% in data center efficiency. Overall cost savings of 40%. And a huge step closer to Hitachi’s goal of being carbon neutral across our operating sites by 2030. And the investment cost pales in significance compared with the perpetual savings to be gained going forward across hardware maintenance and running costs, and software licenses.

Joe Morris, CIO at Hitachi Vantara, oversaw the data center transformation. When we asked him for some words of advice for other CIOs facing a similar challenge, he responded: “Don’t accept the status quo. The only way you can invoke change is to challenge the way things have been done in the past. Get outside your comfort zone.”

To read the full interview with Joe which delves deeper into the project, you can get it here.