It’s always good to know that the world is changing and, hopefully, improving. So it was with interest that I heard that Kathrin Winkler – EMC’s Chief Sustainability Officer – participated earlier today at a hearing of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet. The discussion focused on the relationship between energy efficiency and technological innovation. My colleague Steve O’Donnell has already presented an excellent commentary together with the main points that Kathrin presented for the government’s consideration in his blog.
The advisory from John Kerry’s office (he chairs the subcommittee) says, amongst other things, that the meeting “will also address how firms in the information and communications sectors are driving change and how government as consumer and regulator can help drive incentives to innovate.” Whatever your politics, it would be churlish not to wish such efforts well. And I was intrigued, but not surprised, to see EMC involved. The company is trying hard, and making good strides, to become something of a model corporate citizen. It has instituted a host of sustainablility practices, but rather than repeat what Steve has already covered, I’m going to mention one that is a tad parochial – to both EMC and ESG – and entirely relevant to this topic.
EMC’s IT organization has for some time been working vigorously to ‘practice what it preaches;’ ESG’s Lab Practice VP, Brian Garrett, and I worked last year to investigate and document EMC’s overall internal IT efficiency efforts…which range from instituting far higher levels of server virtualization, to storage (and server!) tiering, deduplication and solid state usage, all the way to imaginative power and cooling consumption reductions, as well as using a cloud computing model where appropriate. It is an impressive – and ongoing – effort and EMC is sharing the best practices it has learned, developed and enjoyed. It is sustainability at work - good for the IT organization, the planet and helpful to EMC’s bottom line. That kind of win-win-win is what can be achieved and is hopefully what the government will learn from Kathrin and others, and then find ways to encourage. This internal IT example and its other extensive corporate efforts suggest that EMC can be a fine witness to the subcommittee’s work.
Read Mark’s other blog entries at The Business of Storage.
