With the start of a new year, VMblog reached out to industry expert, JB Baker, Vice President of Products and Marketing at ScaleFlux, to dig in deeper into a number of topics, including AI infrastructure, sustainability for data centers, and the downturn in the Flash industry.

VMblog:  With the tremendous focus on AI and growth in AI infrastructure in 2023, how will other IT infrastructure initiatives be impacted?

JB Baker:  The AI avalanche accelerates attention to Sustainability and Efficiency in other aspects of the IT infrastructure. All anyone could talk about in 2023 was AI, its wide-ranging potential to change how businesses operate, and its "share of IT wallet" grab (as reflected by NVIDA's revenues in particular).  What was not as publicized was how the massive growth in infrastructure deployment (particularly GPUs, Memory, and Networking) creates challenges for the data centers' ability to handle the new demand for power to operate the hardware running the AI workloads.  At the OCP Global Summit in October, keynotes from industry leaders hit on this point multiple times.  As users deploy AI into existing data centers, they will be forced to find efficiency and sustainability improvements in other areas.  Without improving the power, space, and cost of storage, networking, general-purpose computing, and cooling the data centers won't have enough power to feed the AI beast.  Enabling power efficiency at the system level through innovations in the storage and memory domains is a key focus for ScaleFlux.

VMblog:  How important will sustainability be for data center & IT infrastructure teams?

Baker:  More of the sustainability iceberg will come to the surface in 2024, as data center and IT infrastructure & operations teams will experience growing pressure to show improvements in power efficiency and carbon footprint overall.  The pressure to conduct operations more sustainably has never been higher. According to Deloitte, 75% of organizations have increased their sustainability investments over the past year, focusing on using energy-efficient or climate-friendly machinery, technologies and equipment.   

While some regulations and guidelines (such as the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers The EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres - towards more innovative, sustainable and secure data centre facilities (europa.eu)) call for using the energy efficiency of IT devices as a high priority in the device selection process, simply looking at device-to-device spec sheet comparisons falls short of delivering on the sustainability gains needed to mitigate the growing demand for power from IT infrastructure (particularly with AI's impact on ratcheting up the rate of growth in power demand).  Infrastructure & operations teams will need to look at bigger-picture comparisons to assess the impacts the choice of a given device or IT service has on other aspects of the infrastructure's ability to perform more "work per Watt." Extending the lifespan of devices beyond the traditional 3-5-year refresh cycle, out to 7 years will also gain traction, as major IT consumers and regulators look for additional ways to reduce the total environmental impact of supporting the world's demand for gathering, using, and storing data. 

With data storage projected to account for as much as 14% of the global carbon footprint by 2040 (according to the Journal of Cleaner Production), we will see an increasing focus on storage optimizations to help achieve sustainability targets.

Baker:  With the budget cuts & rethinking of overall product strategies that were driven by the downturn, 2024 will engender greater cross-company collaboration.  The massive decline in the Flash & Memory markets in 2023 had unprecedented impacts on the profitability of NAND and DRAM manufacturers, and corresponding challenges to makers of SSDs and memory modules, as consumer's drives and memory shifted into a "fasting" mode. This drove multiple rounds of investment re-evaluations across the industry. In the aftermath of this market event and budget cuts, many products and development projects have been canceled. Analysts & media are now (4Q23) reporting signs of buyers returning to the table, prices starting to climb, and manufacturers having corrected their output. While that's good news for the NAND, DRAM, SSD and memory module makers, there will be a reluctance to rapidly re-hire and/or return to prior R&D investment levels. With companies finding they can't (or no longer want to) do it all themselves, new collaborations and partnerships will emerge to address end-user needs in an investment-efficient way.

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