Purpose-built and performance-optimised data centre solutions provider, SoftIron, has announced that it has joined the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA).
The SDIA is a platform that aims to create tangible benefits for its members, created as an authoritative source of industry leaders and information, accelerating a path forwards for the digital sector to reduce its environmental impact to as close to zero as possible.
Established in 2019, the Alliance aligns all actors in the digital sector – from energy supply and data centres, to fibre-optic networks and software – on a mission to build a sustainable digital economy and realise its Roadmap to Sustainable Digital Infrastructure by 2030. The digital ecosystem is incredibly complex and, to reduce its environmental impact, the SDIA community facilitates collaboration across the entire value chain to promote a sustainable digital economy – from an environmental, economic, and social perspective.
“SoftIron was founded recognising that the status quo for data centre hardware was unsustainable and fundamentally broken for the needs of the future, impacting everything from energy draw to supply chain obscurity and dependencies, and virtually every manner of waste,” said Phil Straw, CEO and Co-founder of SoftIron.
“SoftIron was created to help lead the industry in the right direction, starting at the core of the problem and working outward. To that end, SoftIron has completely reinvented and modernised how data infrastructure is designed, manufactured and delivered in virtually every regard. Taking the approach that ‘hardware matters,’ SoftIron has developed highly integrated data infrastructure solutions that optimise every aspect of the hardware and software architecture delivering significant carbon footprint reductions for customers using our solutions. We are proud to share the vision of the SDIA and look forward to helping lead the industry toward better collaboration and more sustainable solutions for a greener future.”
“With their fresh approach to hardware design and manufacturing for data infrastructure, we are excited about the potential of bringing in SoftIron’s unique expertise and experience to our organisation,” said Daan Terpstra, Executive Chairman, SDIA. “As a nascent company looking to bring disruption to the market with innovative hardware solutions that reduce energy consumption, heat, and space needed, SoftIron brings a unique perspective to our working groups. Together we will collaborate to develop new concepts and ideas that set new industry standards and make climate-neutral data centres and digital infrastructure a reality.”
Recently, SoftIron investor, Earth Capital, affirmed SoftIron’s status as a global leader in energy-efficient data infrastructure solutions for core-to-edge data centres. In a report titled, ‘SoftIron Carbon Footprint Report 2022’, Earth Capital demonstrated how SoftIron is helping its customers reduce their carbon footprints through the use of its highly integrated HyperDrive storage platform that dramatically reduces space and energy footprint, highlighting that the energy usage of the platform “is up to five times smaller than that of equivalent appliances on the market”.
The report states that for every 10 PB of data storage shipped by SoftIron, an estimated 292 tonnes of CO2e is saved by reduced energy consumption alone. This is the equivalent of 722,322 miles driven by an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle in carbon reduction (relative to 32,744 gallons of gasoline consumed).
The report also calls attention to the reductions in heat that SoftIron’s appliances are able to achieve through their reduced energy consumption, noting that “SoftIron appliances produce up to 80 per cent less heat than the standard, thereby radically reducing emissions pertaining to the cooling of data centres”.
