Rebooting Environments

00:00:04 HOST
Hello, welcome to Cloud Insiders. The podcast that brings cloud down to Earth. Brought to you by Xtravirt. Today, I have the absolute privilege, I’m joined by Joe Bagley and Andrew Gomersal who are just legends in their virtualization industry.
Great we have Joe Bagley CTO of VMware and legend in the virtualization space. And we have Andrew Gomersall MBE, and former England rugby player and the director of N2S. Guys, if I get a quick introduction from the both of you, if I start with Joe how you’ve got here, what you’re doing, and I mean it’s got to be quite a large story one would imagine.
00:00:52 JB
Now, I’ve been in IT now for, I think I started about 94 I think, so that’s along 25 years. What was it called? It wasn’t called IT. You know it wasn’t called IT. Don’t think, but yeah, so I’ve been in this space since then, but various bits and pieces in the 90s, but the sort of the important bit I suppose is that I’ve worked for a growing software company now for over 20 years. I work for Quest software for the first half of this century. For the second half of the century, I’ve worked for VMware and it’s been really, really interesting and exciting sort of watching and working in a rapidly growing software company and I’ve only in the last few years come to realize how special that is because I mean a lot of other people that work in companies that aren’t rapidly growing and it’s a very different environment we want to live in. So yeah, it’s very exciting.
00:01:32 HOST
And Andrew, you probably not coming the most conventional route to working in IT?
00:01:35 AG
Completely not, but actually I hold that sometimes a bit of a strength, you know, not knowing the history, see you too much and looking forward ’cause actually part of people’s challenging in IT is transformation they just can’t get their legacy to a virtualized or new world their so big, but obviously there’s many ways to achieve that, but I sort of look at it as a fresh bill. But now I came blindly into this and literally I knew what an Apple computer was. Why the reason I love Apple is because that is what we did our video analysis through rugby on the guy that did it, did it all you know. He used an Apple and that’s how I learned, you know, to use a laptop was off this guy you know looking at video and you know researching all of our gains and looking at the opposition and all the strategy for the week was done through that.
00:02:28 JB
And which at the time, you thought was magical future stuff and by fairies, right?
00:02:33 AG
Yeah, completely and you know Clive Woodward was the first to bring technology into sport and you know, he says that some of the forwards, once they realized you know what the Internet was and what you could see on the Internet They really took to a laptop at that point and they love technology but genuinely I think there was There was one thing where I think we all have these sort of these ideas in business and we sort of put our head down and we sort of go and focus on it. It is the same in sport you sort of do your job and you don’t have the propensity to look up and see the opportunity. And he did that in technology. So we also we I think we lost against a team and we just said like there’s no space. So, he had this video analysis and this new software where it showed every position where you were on the pitch almost like Subbuteo if you remember that game and he did it, and literally there was I think it was against France, the whole of the French team were bunched in this little huddle like this. And we were spread across the pitch, and he said, you said there was no space but look visually you can see all this space and we were just like Oh my God. So, once we realized all of that, we really took to sort of technology. So, it became a sort of a fascination. You know, to be in it now is quite fascinating time and and why I’m enjoying where I’m at is that it’s still a sort of new part of the world of IT. I think sustainability is still a major topic, it’s it feels like a bit of a startup industry still right now, so that to what Joe’s have been involved in and built those decades. You know, I’m sort of start. I feel that next revolution.
00:04:08 JB
Yeah, the green revolution. Yeah, exactly yeah, quite anyone particularly.
00:04:16 HOST
So, we’re talking today entirely about environmental factors. So, as you mentioned, N2S is all into sustainability in it. And of course, VMware have done ridiculously huge things for the environment through virtualization and you’ve got several green initiatives today we’ve got you representing hardware and software, which is two sides of the coin. If we can start by bringing this down to software and the huge impact the virtualization has had on the world of IT and the world at large. How did the dawn of virtualization affect the environment?
00:04:42 JB
I mean, we’ve got a lot of stats so far, and actually it’s we’ve avoided, you know, 640 million metric tons of CO2 through virtualization, which is the equivalent of I think, last time it’s if you get I think it’s Austria and Switzerland and Spain, or sort of three or four European countries their total emissions for a year is the equivalent save through virtualization, which is phenomenal. That is obviously by running a lot less service than people would need to, which is clearly the thing that’s worth rewinding a bit in history, so back or must be 15 years ago or more. Now I was asked by a friend who I had been at university with to help him out with some stuff we were doing at the British Computer Society and we helped form the data center specialist group for the British Computer Society with the first people to sort of point that the data centers are important to the British Computer Society. You know who would’ve thought it? And that was only 15 years and actually what it was he was being driven by the fact that people were trying to sell he worked for a company that built and operated large data centers. So, people come to some equipment like, you know HVAC equipment and say here’s some HVAC equipment that will pay for itself in 18 months and he was going how do you prove that? How does that work? And So, what we did was we then had to start modeling data centers to start modeling the energy usage in a data center. So if you wanna work with HVAC equipment that’s going to work and actually pay for itself you have to model the energy usage in the energy efficiency of data center. And during that we got involved in wow, this is really interesting ’cause wow these data centers use a lot of power and then we realized there were so many inefficiencies in the design of data centers full stop and so we then got involved in starting what became the European code of Conduct for data centers and so myself and other people in the committee specifically, a newcomer myself and a couple of others wrote what became the best practices part of the EU code of conduct for data centers way back when. And it became a switch from and bear in mind I was a guy who would not really think about the environment. I drove a V8 Range Rover, but I traded in an Audi S8 four so I was hardly the most environmentally friendly person on the planet. And my friend who is involved is also petrol head like me and suddenly we were like this is unbelievable the amount of energy being used in these datacenters is just outrageous. And the kit being used in them was just wrong. We had problems with nonlinear power supplies.
Now this is a basic thing but one worth understanding, and nonlinear power supply means if you’ve got a server and that server has a 350 Watt power supply, typically a nonlinear power supply. If the server has naught percent load on it will still be using about 280 Watts. A linear path data center will be down to next to no power when the preserve is doing nothing and full power in the server to understand but back then all the datas all the servers, they didn’t actually make much difference. Realistically, whether the server is doing anything or not, it’s just that it was on, you know so. That kind of thing, and then we’re looking through the best practices and actually we found one of the most effective best practices for virtualization, especially when you’ve got nonlinear power guys back in those days. But also now with linear power supplies is to consolidate workloads onto fewer servers, which is where virtualization came in and all this sort of benefits of that. And so, a lot of the technology we were doing back in the time was driven arguably around cost saving. It’s cheaper to run on less servers. It’s cheaper to turn your servers off at night because you’re paying high electricity bills, and in fact once you’ve built a data center, the number one biggest cost of that data center is the power right? And so ways to reduce that power were huge, and that’s also paid off from an environmental perspective, so it’s kind of been a win win in that respect.
Once we at VMware then started to realize that there was a benefit to the environment around virtualization, it was something. Well, that’s actually something we can drive down harder, and that’s I suppose what we’ve been doing more recently and looking more effectively into how we can even better help the environment more than we have through technology using virtualization. So really, that’s kind of driven that the last few years of what we’re doing, so the first part was like, wow, this is, you know, doing it not just by accident but by design, and it was then OK fine. How can we do more and more here so you know, things got like DRS and other things that will move workloads running, shutting down based on usage is really important.
00:08:34 AG
Yeah, I guess the return on investment was about financing rather than the benefits of oh, by the way you just saved carbon emissions. You know no one thought about that.
00:08:44 JB
15 years ago no one cared about right. They weren’t there wasn’t even carbon credit schemes, right? Which we then started talking about to people as part of the code of conduct because I was getting people. If I want to say actually, I’m going to half the energy bill for your data center. You’d be like, yeah, tell me what to do next. You know how that works or if I could then with the proper financial model and a data model that actually looks you know physically it’s going to data center, so if you did this, this and this board, these racks did that did that. You’d be able to run 10 times the processing for 2/3 of the cost and you suddenly go OK fine. That makes sense. So yeah, we did it then and then actually the benefit has been around, you know the energy consumption being reduced. Obviously, the secondary effect is you then look at what’s the type of energy going to the data center, you know there’s a whole separate conversation to go on about that and now you know now the cloud providers have done a lot in that space, but I mean a lot of people argue and look at cloud and go cloud is really bad because these cloud providers using all this power and energy, when in fact actually and Andy Jassy of AWS argues this quite well, but really, you know there’s stuff going on in the cloud that would have been done on far bigger, uglier, less efficient servers in people’s data centers. So, it’s actually though that cloud might not be supplied by the greenest of power today at least it’s using less of that then it would have done over here. So, you know that that’s one sort of way of thinking.
00:09:52 AG
Again, that’s just the data coming back and attributing, and that’s where we come in. Its that kind of decommissioning part is what have we saved by turning this data center, turning it down, consolidating it, or literally closing it. Yeah, nobody then goes well that is the benefit of doing that. It is always forward thinking, there is no sort of retrospective look back and some people do it very, very effectively and do it very well, but I think look at what you were discussing before Joe when you put together the proof of concept and you put it all together is putting everything in and then you get your return.
00:10:30 JB
But there is an embodied carbon piece that people don’t look into this right. So there is embedded carbon depending how you want to look at it, right? So once I’ve made a server, there’s a certain amount of carbon and energy and effort that’s gone into building that server. You can’t ever get that back, so what you can do is you can make the most out of what you’ve done and putting that into it. So I think you may go OK, Fantastic. We’ve turned all this stuff off, but what about all the embedded carbon in that stuff? If you just take that and bin it, then actually, you’re doing a disservice to the planet to an extent. What you should be doing is saying, OK well if I can run this still efficiently on to do something else in a more consolidated way then maybe that should be repurposed. So maybe people should not be buying brand new servers.
What they should be doing is going actually I don’t need a brand new server to do this. What I need is maybe one that’s two years old or do the same job.
00:11:13 ag
I’m asking the question really is are you guys as consultants and software provider you doing the vendors in other ways? There’s plenty of groups now in data center world that are trying to really nail down what you just described. What is that carbon that the vendor has, you know, the information. and I don’t think that that’s ever been kind of publicly put out there.
All this stuff that you’ve been doing has been kind of brushing over the fact that point that you just maybe you just never thought about that bit?
00:11:48 JB
I’m a software company. We can only do what we have power over to an extent. So way back when, again, back in the BCS days, one of the predictions I made was at some point, because back then people don’t care. But when you start to go cloud based billing and you start to then go to serverless and things like that where people build you per line of code, then you might start to care about how efficient your code is and way back when we start to look at this I was saying we started to say people will start to write code or favor more efficient code because it costs less to run and so again, yes when you go and look at cloud. What you’re being exposed to, it’s a majority energy cust Of running what you want to do. So I think Cloud has helped us in that way and exposing the energy cost of running that application. So we are now favoring hopefully more efficient applications ’cause they cost less to run ’cause they’re using less resources and again, it’s that old building model in any large old enterprise you have the data center, which there was a Department of people that just filled the data center with kit. There other people came along and use the kit. Very rarely they tide the kit up to the user and the costs were never born through.
It was just we had this cost of the data center and whatever and that was again what we found was when the number of people where the data center people weren’t even seeing the electricity bill ’cause that was dealt with another Department, which was like the corporate power you know? Yeah, so when this is all started to be tide together when you’re providing a cloud service, you have to tie together when you can’t cost it properly. I think we start to see these models so we actually came up with it was a sort of skunkworks project amongst the ambassadors amongst VMware of this sort of Carbon Calculator that can look at your existing environment and work out how you could get efficiencies around what you’re doing in your virtualized environment based on what you have. But again, it’s not looking at from a hardware perspective, is looking at it from a pure sort of software and how much energy that hardware is using it, so I know that it’s not looking at what’s the embodied carbon of the kit that we’re using, and what’s the life cycle of that and where does that go after which is I know where you play quite heavily, isn’t making sure we get the absolute most out of that before we finally say right there’s nothing I can do with that.
We and other things have made a massive difference in this space, but do you think they go far enough? Or not?
00:13:57 AG
So the answer is no, but all the effort to do that what is the benefit? And what we’re trying to show is there is a benefit. Is that then attributed to the person that bought the the kit to start with? Offsetting their original carbon negativity, and so we’re trying to say that Reuse is a very healthy place to be where a service provider that reuses it elsewhere for another customer, potentially. Rather than them reusing it in their own infrastructure, it’s how you attribute that. And there are ways of doing that, and that’s what we’re trying to create is almost a sustainability dashboard right to say everything that you’ve got rid of has an implication for you positively to get you to net zero, which you know…
00:14:42 JB

It’s almost giving credit back for people because that’s going to be reused through you exactly as opposed to be being thrown away. So there’s a whole system picture here.
00:14:54 AG
It’s the same with, we’re in logistics as well, so there’s forward and reverse logistics. Not too many people join the two together. The data from reverse logistics is so retrospective it never gets kind of joined up, and that’s what we’re trying to sort of achieve. Really.
There are companies with unbelievable consolidation programs I mean Years and years. You figure that the biggest service provider in the UK there consolidation program for the next 15 years is absolutely a massive. You know, as a small business as an SME we are not, you’d have to have 10 to 20 companies like us to do the consolidation. That’s how big it it is. So we were talking about the future and you know cloud and virtualization and I’m looking at stuff of legacy going it’s still whirling around and it’s still, you know, so I always looked at a data center is a farmyard, and it’s a building you know as a site. There are so many sites full of legacy infrastructure that’s still whirling away and still being used, and it’s absolutely core to people’s businesses. You think of transport, transport network and what revolution we’re going to be going through on the transport network is just crazy.
And yet we’re still using some of the old stuff. I mean, it’s absolutely frightening. So, my point being is that with this sustainability agenda, there is an absolute mass, so everyone’s going how we going to get to net zero. There is a ton of things you can do to kind of offset it, and it’s all to do with consolidation piece. Yeah, that’s where the the data is weak.
00:16:27 Speaker 1
And we’re trying to do the consolidation in software too, right. So we’re trying to avoid that and what we’re trying to do is drive asset sweating. I suppose if you want to look at it that way.
There’s this, you know, this tendency in that we have a single fast fashion right in the real world where is horrendous for the environment where you go to the shops, where it’s you know, new clothes every week, or yes, there’s a fast fashion in technology as well. You know servers get to three years old, we refresh them, servers get to five years old we refresh them or whatever, and sometimes it’s almost like why we refresh it because we always refresh at three years or five years. You know at least cars.
And that made sense in the old, non virtualized world. ’cause in the old non virtualized world you have Project X you going by the service for Project X you put the service projects in a data center, projects of work and then maybe five years down the line. Someone go. Project X is a bit flakey, right? Let’s start project why you’d get the new kit for project. Why migrate from X to Y and burn Project X? And that’s basically how it works forever, right? And it still works to this. What we’re looking at is thinking of looking at the data center much more as.
00:17:22 Speaker 1
One big computer.
00:17:24 Speaker 1
And so every element that you put into that is just adding into the pool of resources that are available to people to use rather than being assigned specifically to one person so that virtualization layer we put across the top of storage computing networking means that.
00:17:37 Speaker 1
There’s a great benefit as a as a consumer because what you’re doing is you’re saying OK well, every three months I’m going to put new kit into my data center, but the great thing is because of virtualization I can move all my most important stuff to run next day.
00:17:49 Speaker 1
On the brand new faster processors or the faster storage ’cause it’s just added to the pool, I’d have to change the apps I just, but what that means is the older stuff can start to shift left or shift right depending which side you’re standing in and move further and further down the chain. So you might find that yes, the old, less important stuff, not so business critical overnight data analysis things or whatever. Yeah, they’re they’re running on service from eight years ago or seven years ago.
00:18:11 Speaker 1
The very edge to the point where you know end of life starts become a much longer story. But what we’re doing by putting that layer of virtualization software across is we’re smoothing that out. We’re making a lot easier for you to shift hardware around.
00:18:22 Speaker 1
As opposed to, as you well know, it’s incredibly tide to a particular project, a particular you know, piece of infrastructure, or that’s to do with that. We’re trying to say no. Let’s just break all that down, you know, and that’s what, so it’s private cloud. If there is such a thing, that’s what it’s all about. Yeah, and so it would be much more for you. Know, someone. There’s no reason why someone couldn’t inject rather than brand new kit into that picture. They could inject some, some you stick it into that picture. That’s just good, you know. And what you start to say.
00:18:47 Speaker 1
Is OK actually, because we’ve citri longword disintermediated.
00:18:51 Speaker 1
The apps from the hardware you’re not down to buying this particular vendor or this particular hardware or this particular thing. You can go right? Is it X86 or does IT support 1 gig Ethernet? You know, great, fine, let’s bolted in and add it to the pool. That’s what we’re trying to do so you know again from a sustainability perspective, it might mean that you’re not always out there buying brand new stuff, yeah?
00:19:10 Speaker 2
Yeah, and you’re right, we’re we’re a projectized business for that reason.
00:19:13 Speaker 2
But also, it sounds like it’s going to just be mainly a utility. There’s going to be less of concern about exactly what. Yeah, if it is brand new or versus.
00:19:23 Speaker 2
It’s a kind of 2nd user and it’s just it becomes a utility rather than. Yeah just sexy. Cool, brand new when you go latest greatest thing.
00:19:31 Speaker 1
When you can rent your virtual machine from Amazon, do you know what server is running on complain? No or any other service providers? You know there’s a limited few of them that will you buy specific hardware, but in most cases you don’t care whether it’s one year or three, or is it running fast enough? Does it meet the spec you want?
00:19:43 Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s the answer, right, yeah?
00:19:45 Speaker 3
So Andrew is said with end to ask you folks on the reusing of things, and you say that when you get something you could put something front center and the old stuff slowly moves left and right when something does become UN useful. Or you know, sometimes things get shipped out to other countries and essentially I think I was reading on your website. Just put into landfills simplifier.
00:20:04 Speaker 3
Yeah, what’s interesting to kind of circumvent.
00:20:07 Speaker 2
That yeah, well I think.
00:20:08 Speaker 2
We’ve always come at it from a recycling, so our terminology, I think, is we can.
00:20:14 Speaker 2
Disposal, recycling, yeah, they all they kind of mean different things to different people and that’s where I think our terminology is. It needs refining so disposal can mean reusing sometimes. Yeah, we’ve we’ve disposed of it as a as a customer. Therefore I’ve just kind of thinking in my brain. It’s gone into a bin.
00:20:35 Speaker 2
Well, actually it’s being reused so.
00:20:38 Speaker 2
It’s understanding that supply chain and actually what happens the reality in all of this is.
00:20:45 Speaker 2
If you dispose of something as a client, do you understand what’s happening next? Now the market decides what’s really happening because our world is still driven by economics and value. So we’ve come at it from a recycling.
00:21:00 Speaker 2
World where there’s always a value. You break it down and we do everything very old school by hand. So yes we have machinery but we still look after the product so we want it disassembled. You know really meticulously into its component parts.
00:21:15 Speaker 2
And so we know we understand it’s lowest value, if that makes sense. Yeah, now some of it is hazardous material and there is a cost to it. So when you’re disposing, you’re actually having to spend money to dispose of it versus there’s a value to it. So a server.
00:21:30 Speaker 2
We love servers because they’re they’re beautiful pieces of, you know, ingenuity in terms of.
00:21:37 Speaker 2
When you break it down, how much wonderful material is in that in that product? Yeah, so, and that has a value because in a sustainable world actually the reason it’s so important now is we’re running out of these materials to manufacture. Yeah, so for me, our raison d’etre at the moment on a macro is that loop.
00:21:58 Speaker 2
How are the vendors in the?
00:22:00 Speaker 2
People that manufacture so huge supply chain. I mean, you’re talking of all the vendors in the world. They’ve all got very, you know, very desperate. Very different supply chains to then manufacture again. There are vendors that are stipulating we will not.
00:22:16 Speaker 2
Manufacture with Virgin material in the future. Now there’s no set date on that.
00:22:21 Speaker 2
Yeah, but there.
00:22:22 Speaker 2
There the view is from a sustainable messages. We can’t keep drilling into the Earth to get these materials. You know the gold and platinum.
00:22:30 Speaker 2
Palladium Indium that goes into touch screen technology we can’t get was actually we’re running out. Yeah, it’s harmful to the environment and we’re running out. So my question and raising vector is to kind of create that supply chain where we’re looping back in the material that you manufactured 10 years ago. That material. How do we get it back into a form where you can re manufacture?
00:22:52 Speaker 2
With the material not not. It’s not like a carcass build or like a second user. Take the like his coat off and then you’ve got all the material.
00:23:00 Speaker 2
Inside now we’re talking about the whole of the middle, the whole minerals and materials. Yeah, so, but the re use element has always been there. Once we get a server into our into our building, there’s a tipping point and it’s a. It’s a monetary value and you just go. It’s it’s recycling. Yeah, versus we’re going to reuse this button. There’s ways you can harvest. It’s appending the vendors. Harvest the materials.
00:23:22 Speaker 2
Or the products within the server, so I’ll take this out and I’ll take that out and we separate everything and they can reuse those elements.
00:23:29 Speaker 2
But realistically, I mean lots of product lines as well. That’s one of the other things. I mean, Cisco has 20,000 product lines, you know 20,000 different bits of equipment that has to be manufactured in a certain way, so that way you’re.
00:23:42 Speaker 1
Supporting all kit as well, right? So someone phoned you up and they’re running a 10 year old thing and they can’t actually buy the modularly or thinking we still wanna chat.
00:23:48 Speaker 2
Yeah, right is the last argument.
00:23:50 Speaker 2
There we go and then now it’s at.
00:23:52 Speaker 1
So that’s the reason.
00:23:54 Speaker 2
That without that will always be the case, but you know. And this comes back to the history of myself coming into it quite blindly is kind of.
00:24:01 Speaker 2
The manufacturers need to make a decision on are you going to really reuse so HP, a great company that have a reuse Department and they’ve they’ve got some wonderful. But this is kind of line of that’s going against our sales teams that are selling you, you know, and it’s kind of like I despair at that sort of.
00:24:22 Speaker 2
Narrative is just.
00:24:23 Speaker 1
Let’s just write the complaints though. Yeah, I clicked on your yeah on your recycling bin though, so that really intrigues me so.
00:24:29 Speaker 1
I’m a judge. Anything called the Global Good Awards, which is about if you want to summarize. It’s about profitable sustainability. Yeah, a lot of sustainability costs right? You have to spend to be sustainable. Will look at, you know you want to put solar panels in your house. You want to put batteries on the side. It it costs money. However, if we can make it such that sustainable option is the cheaper option, then we win, right? Literally win. So in that prospect, how close do you think we are with some of these raw materials that it’s cheaper to use the reclaimer or materials than it is to use?
00:24:55 Speaker 1
Them remind yeah, do you see this, yeah.
00:24:57 Speaker 2
No, I don’t. That’s it.
00:24:58 Speaker 2
Yeah, I think I think.
00:25:00 Speaker 2
The tipping point if you think about the monopoly that was in the jewelry market, diamonds so.
00:25:04 Speaker 1
The invention of the price of a diamond yeah.
00:25:05 Speaker 2
Yeah, completely so they kind of look at that line and there is a tipping point where we’re actually desperate. Now we’ve run out just highlighting mobile devices, you know. Again, you don’t know mobile phone we do, yeah, but not. You know, we’re not a major player, but you know we are starting to see a lot of mobile.
00:25:21 Speaker 2
Phones and mobile phones definitely need to be reused, but then 5G is coming and all of our phones they’re not 5G compatibles so.
00:25:30 Speaker 2
I think there’s a tipping point in ADA technology and and kind of how it’s run and what is run, but also the material us running out.
00:25:40 Speaker 2
Yeah, so that that’s the tipping point rather than it being the cost part, we feel like we’re million miles away from that actually. But actually what we should be doing is accelerating. Going what’s right for the environment rather than the economics. The economics should work and they will work they.
00:25:55 Speaker 1
Should follow faster, correct, correct? That point should be that it must get the point at some point.
00:26:00 Speaker 1
So it’s cheaper to buy unobtanium from you than it is to go and mine unobtanium at the ground. That’s that’s where.
00:26:05 Speaker 2
It should get. Yeah, you can’t even see us in this whole table here. You can’t even see us at the moment in the Grand Funk companies. Now this.
00:26:13 Speaker 2
Is true, but it is true.
00:26:14 Speaker 2
That if you don’t share it, the art of the possible you know, and I think I think it was Dell that was reusing plastics for certain type of.
00:26:22 Speaker 2
Laptop, you know that was a start.
00:26:25 Speaker 1
Some tells also doing it for classes. They’re doing it with rate. They’re using reclaimed ocean plastic for the package.
00:26:30 Speaker 1
So there’s a whole bunch of.
00:26:32 Speaker 2
The supply chain is endless in terms of sustainability. That’s what’s so exciting once you start, but I would. I would always go back to the actual hardware itself, because that’s that’s actually the potential inefficiency and where the water that goes into garment as well as making ban, you know, we’ve got a real water crisis coming, you know?
00:26:50 Speaker 2
Something’s gotta kind of change.
00:26:52 Speaker 1
Is good that you talked about companies wanting to be. It’s the right thing to do rather than the you know the the commercial. You know that that for me is what sort of strikes home.
00:27:00 Speaker 1
VM Ware is we we quite often do a lot of. It’s the right thing to do rather than it’s just the commercially right thing to do. And that’s that’s, you know, we are text, not.
00:27:07 Speaker 2
Shared decision it’s no.
00:27:08 Speaker 1
It’s a it’s a right thing to do and the people that work for the company feel that we’re doing the right thing when we do it. So you know, a lot of the activities that we do along those lines. Specifically, I think we’re seeing that across the board. Actually, we’re starting to see that, you know.
00:27:20 Speaker 1
Companies realizing that actually doing the right thing is just as important in terms of attracting customers as doing, you know, the commercially most lucrative things you know.
00:27:28 Speaker 2
So yeah, I think that she.
00:27:30 Speaker 2
It is I I said it in a couple of things that I’ve been speaking about. The shift really from the employee so you know, fantastic brand that you guys have and it oozes out sustainability and then that helps the employees buy into it as well. Whereas I think there are some companies where the employees doing the opposite they’re trying to.
00:27:51 Speaker 2
Share with their own business about sustainability and I think that that was around Sky News and the oceans and the plastic. Yeah, and this whole you know the Blue planet and.
00:28:00 Speaker 2
It’s just amazing saying what bad we’re doing to our environment is so visible now. Yeah, you know, across the board through their star Sky News that actually employees are starting to go to their own company and saying, yeah, we can do something we should be doing something rather than learn. It’s going to cost money.
00:28:15 Speaker 1
And you know, for us you know it has to come from the top. For us. It’s come from the top, the very top and all of us in the senior management, you know.
00:28:21 Speaker 1
Believe in this as a company you can see that just just being here. It’s not just about having electric car Chargers in the car park, it’s about the customers come to work and they feel that they’re they’re more active coming to.
00:28:30 Speaker 1
Like isn’t doing harm, and in fact it’s doing good. You know we hit last year carbon neutral target. We’ve also hit our 100% renewable power supply target globally, so you know it’s those things mean a lot to employees. You know when the the celebration we have internally with those things happen is huge, but that’s very important to how we do things at VM Ware, you know and.
00:28:50 Speaker 1
We’re looking to drive that in other ways that we behave, and I think the more we can get, companies realizing that behaving ethically and in the right way, you know this is. This is all.
00:29:00 Speaker 1
Other issues as well outside of sustainability, but you know something sustainability with that we we have a strong belief in that yeah, I mean, do you think that’s something that runs through into S you? You talk about we do sustainable thing. Do you think the employees feel they’re doing good and what they’re doing in their job?
00:29:13 Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean we say visible. That’s the thing. Yeah, we have warehouses full of equipment ready to be processed for either reuse.
00:29:20 Speaker 2
Or recycling so it’s so visible. Yeah, yeah and yeah we have one client at the moment with over 6000 pallets to get rid of.
00:29:30 Speaker 2
And they’ve had them for, let’s just say a decade. I mean, it’s it’s staggering and that that’s a series of their customers. And you know, there are logistics business and it’s it’s quite scary once you start to ask the question. Well, yeah, right yeah, so there’s 60 passing by on the M40 in the M1 you pass these big buildings? Yeah no, I don’t know what to think, yeah?
00:29:48 Speaker 1
Those are being heated. They’ll it would be.
00:29:52 Speaker 1
They’re being built, you know, just a house, maybe?
00:29:53 Speaker 2
Not these ones that we go to.
00:29:57 Speaker 2
But you know they are staff under.
00:30:00 Speaker 2
And because there I saw the UN saying that 2020 decade for delivery around you and sustainable goals. Yes, an I kind of like that because, you know, you look forward you. We always look forward in our business. You have to look backwards. A lot of the time and a lot of companies just by focusing on forward and focusing on you.
00:30:22 Speaker 2
They’ve done nothing for so long. You know we have a responsibility in Pool marketing and not sharing exactly.
00:30:30 Speaker 2
Those best practices and what you should be doing. Also the guidance. So we have the we directed the we directed was 2007.
00:30:37 Speaker 2
It’s really. I mean, we’re 2020.
00:30:39 Speaker 2
Now you know, so there’s. There’s a lot of information.
00:30:43 Speaker 1
That you mentioned the UN SDGS. There are not. People don’t know what they own STSR.
00:30:46 Speaker 2
He said that’s what they’re saying is this is the year that.
00:30:50 Speaker 2
Yeah, part of the SDGS is sharing those you know. Just see from an education pieces. Tell your customers, tell your friends, tell your there are seven.
00:31:00 Speaker 2
SDGS, you know, tell them you know and not everyone can do. You know the way I would take a lot of those but.
00:31:05 Speaker 1
We mainly focus on 9, which is the infrastructure one so. But if you ask someone at VM Ware they will tell you they know about the SDGS they know them. We mainly focus on SG-9. I do a lot worse than SG-9 but because but I’m surprised I’m ready to go and they see that little badge with a 17 second no it was that is that game.
00:31:20 Speaker 1
But you know that’s it. Yeah, exactly fascinating.
00:31:23 Speaker 2
It is and so I think. So this decade is kind of looking forward. I think you know we’ve we’ve had.
00:31:30 Speaker 2
Plastics kind of revolution of you know. You see it just consumer wise and how wasteful we are and the oceans are full of plastic and we’ve had that and now I think there’s going to be a sort of, you know, my being in a family business. My father is always dealt with metals, you know, and that’s predominantly what makes it so. We’ve had the plastic. Yes, plastic is part of it.
00:31:52 Speaker 2
But I think the revolution coming is is around, you know, and and we we. Something’s always been the case in steel, and you know.
00:31:59 Speaker 2
And copper and gold. And you know, it’s always been the case, but I think as we are making more and more devices which we are. You know you know different kinds of devices, smaller, less, probably needing the materials but still hungry for certain different materials. This is an era of revolution. Of how the hell do we reuse these? So we’ve got a cool new technology that’s not harmful to the environment.
00:32:23 Speaker 2
Basically, separating because we kind of glue it all together. Then yeah, we sold it all and.
00:32:28 Speaker 2
Then how do you? How do?
00:32:30 Speaker 2
Universe that we found a way to reverse that and separate those metals completely. UN harmful to the environment. Basically it’s called by leaching. It’s happened in the mining industry. It exists today, so if you went home and looked it up, it exists, but nobody’s really looking at it in a large scale in terms of, you know, returning the materials to.
00:32:51 Speaker 2
How they once were wow, yeah. And how does that?
00:32:54 Speaker 1
Work or do it.
00:32:54 Speaker 1
Revolves around the idiots. Go ahead.
00:32:57 Speaker 2
It revolves around the circuit boards.
00:32:59 Speaker 2
So that’s where OK. The gold is pretty much is in the circuit circuitry circuit boards, so it’s separating the gold, the copper, the platinum Palladium, and what we’ve been doing with circuit boards for generations is burning it, or using assets, which is incredibly hard. Twice, twice lots of processes, just like, yeah, that’s completely.
00:33:20 Speaker 2
So you you talked about, you know where’s the tipping point? And I’m thinking these are major industries.
00:33:24 Speaker 2
Yeah, big businesses.
00:33:27 Speaker 2
Even I know a vendor that went into.
00:33:30 Speaker 2
See how they extract the precious metals, and there was a door and they weren’t allowed to go in that door. Something, yeah, so you’re kind of going OK, so this industry has been incredible. Had such positive ITI economic wise? Yeah, it’s powerful because you’re getting the materials back. You’re trading gold and copper. And yeah, it’s a big big industry.
00:33:51 Speaker 2
But what are they doing to protect the environment? And that’s the questions that’s going to happen, but we found a way that it works for the environment. It works economically.
00:34:00 Speaker 2
An and it’s kind of perfect.
00:34:02 Speaker 2
For the reverse.
00:34:03 Speaker 2
Of and then you have this material. And where does it go? So there’s a. It’s a minefield of conversation with supply chain and manufacture and and and the point is.
00:34:14 Speaker 2
Is that when you come to buy these devices? If they client a consumer business is looking at that and you support the goals you want to buy something that has had you know it’s due diligence of it’s how it’s been manufactured.
00:34:27 Speaker 1
What’s the provenance is important as well. OK, so.
00:34:30 Speaker 2
That’s where the value is potentially going to be huge for the future.
00:34:34 Speaker 1
So if you got a lot of gold bars in.
00:34:36 Speaker 2
Your office and not yet it’s coming. It’s coming, it’s coming. But the amazing thing is you don’t have to go and buy it. The feed is there. Yeah, it’s massive, it’s huge. And when you when you actually open up a server, I mean, these things are just incredible.
00:34:51 Speaker 2
Incredible bits technology.
00:34:52 Speaker 1
I’m thinking through what I’ve got in my garage now stacked up I could be making some money from.
00:34:56 Speaker 2
Whatever the interest value will.
00:34:58 Speaker 2
Be popping, yeah, just on random.
00:35:00 Speaker 1
You know where it is coming? Pick one up, yeah?
00:35:02 Speaker 2
Yeah, another world.
00:35:04 Speaker 3
Do you see in the next decade I love the stuff we’ve already sent to landfill in other countries. We might end up buying back or direction not.
00:35:11 Speaker 2
Really, no, I think they are literally dead and buried. You know there are mining of landfill sites there, but I think they know well.
00:35:21 Speaker 2
It’s yeah that jury’s out, but I think there’s I think those are buried. Yeah, for good and and certainly there won’t be much metal in there that is for sure so.
00:35:32 Speaker 2
There’s enough of a problem, and then you think about batteries for the future with the knew EV Revolution. Yeah, that will. Again, we will have to have a form of environmental sustainable recycling of the battery so they can be reused.
00:35:47 Speaker 1
That’s an interesting point. The battery recycling. This is the fun thing. So the battery recycling industry.
00:35:52 Speaker 1
Hasn’t started yet, right? Because there’s not the availability of batteries to recycle, yeah?
00:35:58 Speaker 2
And they’re gonna last long, and they’re lasting.
00:36:00 Speaker 1
But yeah, so the battle. These Ev’s we got in last three years. And you spend 10,000 but rubbish all these batteries in all these electric cars are lasting way too long, so long that there’s not enough of them to start a sustainable. Yeah, exactly business in batteries yet.
00:36:14 Speaker 1
It’ll come in time, but I think when you look at that, that’s a really good example of where reuse is being thought about from the start. So you put in a car for 10 years, then you take it out of the car and literally integrity as it is. You Bolt it to the side of the house and then use it to backup solar panels another 10 or 15 years and.
00:36:30 Speaker 1
Then at the end of all that, the best thing about it is literally 99.99% the minerals in it. You can reclaim out of it to go and use again to build another one if they don’t get used up. So whenever people talk about going on a small rant but will talk to lithium, there’s not enough lithium. It’s like the best thing that lithium is. We only need to dig it up once. Oil we dig it up, burn it, and it’s gone. Lithium, we dig it up once, and then it’s we’ve got it forever.
00:36:51 Speaker 1
Yeah, we’ll just keep using it. We don’t throw it away in anyway. We very carefully keep on it and all the other stuff that’s in those batteries. You know, that’s really important. I mean, it does get to this week.
00:36:58 Speaker 2
We can get to that is.
00:37:00 Speaker 2
Not really, the infrastructure needs to improve, but the quicker we can get to that then we have a proper sustainable vertical really, yeah?
00:37:08 Speaker 3
Are you noticing circling back to reuse over recycling? Are you noticing any nervousness when it comes to people wanting to give up their hardware just out of a security breach point of view?
00:37:17 Speaker 2
Of them, it’s mainly because they’re not sure what to do.
00:37:20 Speaker 2
So they just kind of hold on is the is the default. Yeah, there’s an element of.
00:37:26 Speaker 2
Our job is to, you know, provide that managed piece.
00:37:29 Speaker 1
But yeah, you can wipe the data only.
00:37:31 Speaker 2
After you do all of that, yeah, that sort of you can wipe it. You can do it yourself. You don’t need somebody like us to do it, although people just kind of go, I don’t want the admin. I don’t want the pain you do it, and so we will, and therefore we do it to reuse it. So we don’t want to just read it and destroy it.
00:37:48 Speaker 2
Working with somebody like Jefra is really important to us. ’cause you know, there’s a big play on sustainable in it was termed ICT. Now it’s just straight to it because no one says ICT apparently anyway.
00:38:00 Speaker 2
So it’s around a sustainable part of it. We’re working with them to stop something like incineration, because plenty of government departments are saying we need to incinerate it now. You don’t know it’s harmful to the environment, you do not need. There is enough great software. There is machinery that destroys it to a certain level. No one’s ever going to get that data. Why are we incinerating?
00:38:20 Speaker 2
And so we’re trying to stop is part of a group. Yeah, we’re trying to stop as a group. Just taking incineration out.
00:38:27 Speaker 1
’cause it’s just not someone. If someone comes to you.
00:38:30 Speaker 1
Is is the is a hard drive more valuable, shredded or interact does not matter to you.
00:38:36 Speaker 2
Know it does matter. It’s it’s better to wipe it and reuse it. Obviously for obvious reasons, so intact and then commercially. It’s better that in that regard, obviously there are companies that I just have a zero tolerance. We will never reuse them just for fear of.
00:38:50 Speaker 2
That that overwrite hasn’t properly worked in some data is leaked, so they will have a zero tolerance and we will erase, destroy, shred and will do all of those things.
00:39:00 Speaker 2
That’s just part of the, you know the managed service and whatever they they want, you can steer somebody. You can advise somebody, but I think there’s still that human visibility of I’ve seen it shredded. I know that it will never come back into play and there is still a legacy of people that are zero tolerance too. Pretty open whatever. I’m happy you’re using that software.
00:39:21 Speaker 2
But we we know we want to reuse everything, yeah, I mean that’s a that’s a clear plan, but demand is telling you reuse is effective rather than.
00:39:30 Speaker 2
We’re trying to drive at the moment. The honesty is if it, if it’s worth money then we’ll reuse it. That’s the crux of it.
00:39:37 Speaker 3
Yeah, so playing Devil’s advocate a little bit when coming back down to this energy usage. Yeah, kind of situation. Is it always best to hold onto your old stuff or when we’re in the land of hyperconverged, an composable infrastructure?
00:39:50 Speaker 3
Is it sometimes worth getting the biggest, brightest, newest from the perspective that will eat a lot less power? Is everything so much more efficient now? I think the answer is you need to.
00:40:00 Speaker 1
Make an evaluation. At that point, there’s no yes or no to that, right? So there will be situations where when you look at both the embodied carbon in the manufacture of the device, and then the ongoing running costs of that device you actually find it’s more expensive to the environment to do that, then it would be to just keep running what you’re running at the same time you got to look at it. On the flip side is OK. How much is that embedded carbon is actually exposed with the cost of the device, right? So does it cost me a lot of money to buy the hardware? That’s one way to look at it, right? And so?
00:40:25 Speaker 1
Anyone’s gonna look at, you know if I spend £10,000 to save myself 5000 pounds on electricity, then obviously it’s going to pay for itself in two years. It’s a no brainer, so you gotta look at it that way too. I don’t think we’ve got to a point now with a lot of things where the optimization around NRG has pretty much gone as far as it can in a lot of data centers that we go and see in terms of the new kit that’s going in, they are linear power supplies, they are.
00:40:48 Speaker 1
Much better managed, you know much more efficient in everything that they do in every possible way, and that’s just what happened with the hardware, so you know I’m not going to argue that you know hyper converged or composable infrastructure. You want composable infrastructure as well.
00:41:00 Speaker 1
Looking for really yeah but composable infrastructure and those kind of things. They’re a great answer to actually making something last longer so you know. So in that context, if I’ve got hyper converter composable, it fits much better into that model that I talked about before, where that thing could potentially exist for many years. Having different types of workloads on it, ’cause it gives it, it’s easier to reconfigure on the fly and and reapply things too.
00:41:23 Speaker 1
It’s not quite so job dedicated, so actually I would say if you’re taking stuff that’s already being used as universal virtualized hardware.
00:41:30 Speaker 1
Replacing it with hyper converged stuff that maybe might not have quite the benefit that you’re expecting in terms of you know carbon impact or NRG Impact. But yes, certainly if you’re taking something that’s dedicated hardware or something, even if it’s virtual, ated virtualized, dedicated hardware and going to University available, throw it into the pool of resource is hardware that’s obviously going to benefit and hyper converged just the way that we’re seeing people do that more than anything else. ’cause it’s the easy way to do it.
00:41:52 Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s not Lego building block. You buy something that’s got on board storage compute and no networking ports on it and bang, that’s your next building block.
00:42:00 Speaker 1
Just keep whacking aminon.
00:42:01 Speaker 3
They laid overtime, so yeah, it’s it’s not a yes and no answer to that question. There’s a lot of variables involved, probably where the carbon Calculator comes back into it. Can help with some of that. Yeah, definitely, yeah. And you’re saying about the electricity in servers? That’s been the major cost of data centers that ring true for all the calling as well. Yeah, so going to buy into their people, put in their data centers in remote Scandinavian country totally.
00:42:22 Speaker 1
Yeah yeah, entirely so when you look at when you look at a data center that the very crude metric.
00:42:27 Speaker 1
That you look at is PUE, which is power usage effectiveness, which is essentially if I take 1 unit of data in how much of that one unit of power, in how much of that power actually gets to the equipment OK, and how much of it is taken up with the supporting functions around the equipment. There’s an inverse of that which is one over that, But basically if you talk about PUY you talk about, if I’ve got a PU of two.
00:42:49 Speaker 1
Thereby what that means is I need to take in two units of electricity for every one unit that I actually use. That’s pretty bad, really. What you want to get obviously is 1, which is you.
00:43:00 Speaker 1
Perfection right? Perfection every you know, get in. But of course there’s always going to be overheads of some form. Now those overheads, typically our power and cooling, and the parent calling overheads are exactly that. The stuff running the UPS is the stuff running the Transformers and then the calling to actually keep the data center running as it is what you’ll start to find is that you go OK, fine. Well, how do I start to reduce my PUE? Now? Here’s the other interesting thing. You can’t compare Puds between facilities.
00:43:22 Speaker 1
Right, because that data center over there with the UE of two might be better actually than updates entropy over here of 1.5 OK.
00:43:30 Speaker 1
’cause it depends what the compute itself is doing. You know what’s it being used for and also where that power coming from and what type of power is it? OK, so you can have a P. We have less than one, so how do you get the you have less than one? How do you get P with .8? Generate your own power? Yeah, it’s that simple right? So or get to the point where you get to combined heat and power.
00:43:51 Speaker 1
Battery power station is the way to think about this, right? So back to the power station used to have active cooling and the calling that was used used to use hot water pipes. Those hot water pipes.
00:44:00 Speaker 1
Delivered to heat, the water in the local properties so the houses around back home, so combining parts called CHP. I’ve seen people with bad data centers where the calling part of the data centers are used to heat the municipal swimming pool for the counselor whose data center is. So that’s where you can start to get peas and less than one. How do you lower your P? Drastically reduce your cooling requirements? How do you reduce according requirements? Put your data centers on my cooler.
00:44:20 Speaker 1
Yeah so yeah go and build them up North. The idea is to go and build in Iceland. Why build in Iceland? Well, because actually nice and you never actually actively need to call the data center you just use.
00:44:30 Speaker 1
Fresh air cooling, which is a part of saying open the window and put a fan in it, right? There’s an element of D humidification that has to go on to dry the air out of it. ’cause I see these things don’t like to run in completely in high humidity, but at the same time the power that you’re pulling in from Iceland entirely green. It’s all hydro. It’s all geothermal. You can’t get greener than that. So actually, from a carbon perspective, it’s fabulous.
00:44:50 Speaker 1
From PUE perspective, you can get stupidly low, even less than one piece is really interesting where you can go with this, and that’s really cool. Interesting things I’ve done. Lots of data center tours as part of this job I’ve seen.
00:45:00 Speaker 1
Diabatic cooling, which is where you dribble it down a sheet and evaporates. That’s essentially evaporative cooling. There’s a whole bunch of new and exciting ways of doing this, but also there’s been a change in in the kit that we put in data centers. Now the interesting thing about data centers is that all the specs for putting it in datacenters we found back in the day when we started playing this game were written for.
00:45:20 Speaker 1
What temperature computer normally stopping at 21 degrees 21 degrees? Why’s that?
00:45:25 Speaker 3
Ambient room temperature made everything work perfectly, no humans.
00:45:29 Speaker 3
We like to be comfortable.
00:45:30 Speaker 1
Correct, so old data center stuff humans in them. The operator said to live in them so you what we did was we build a kit to operate human temperatures, right? So if you start to go now we’ve got the dark data centers where you don’t send humans in the very often. You can run your data center at 30 degrees Centigrade, which means it means a lot less cooling. Fantastic, right? Suddenly you’ve got.
00:45:49 Speaker 1
Far less requirements on cooling kit actually. Maybe runs a bit better at 30 degrees than it does whatever there is a thermal break over point with Silicon, which is a whole separate podcast, but in essence you can run your kit warm.
00:46:00 Speaker 1
You can run it in humidity levels that are different, because again, those humidity specs were set around humans, not computers. So we’re building a set of standards for data centers that were based on people being in them, and people don’t need to be in them anymore, right? So start thinking differently and if you start thinking differently, you start thinking OK. I don’t know when I can run for get hot and cold aisle separation. I just have the whole thing running at 30 degrees or even.
00:46:21 Speaker 1
I’ll have the hotel will be at 45 degrees and the cold air will be at 25 or 30. You know it’s it’s going then suddenly.
00:46:27 Speaker 2
You see more and more and.
00:46:30 Speaker 2
Gotta be bigger, is that right?
00:46:31 Speaker 1
What the number of data centers? Yeah, so we are seeing an increasing number that people aren’t destroying data centers. There’s no doubt about that and I think this gets down to yes. We’re building data center building hotter datacenters. Interesting, we’re doing it. Just come back to that thing. I’ll move on. My favorite thing was when we started to do this, we realized that there was a kind of a semi a standard for.
00:46:50 Speaker 1
Front to back cooling for kids he put Iraq sucked colder in the front, puts it in the back and in fact we found that dribbling air past it rather than pumping it past. It’s better all that kind of stuff but certain manufacturers.
00:47:00 Speaker 1
To pull from right to left, which made no sense. But typically they were network manufacturers, ’cause in the old telco world you didn’t pull front to back as the front had all the plugs and stuff on it. So you pulled left to right or right to left depending on who you buying it from. And so it was a nightmare. So now we’ve got the point where things are actually standardizing, at least on pulling front to back in racks, but you know that’s another example of how you get efficiency in a sentence.
00:47:21 Speaker 1
Amount of stuff. Yeah 1% agree and I think that’s where we need to start looking at what we’re putting in the cloud and why. And maybe there’s an ethical element to that, you know?
00:47:30 Speaker 1
Render Swan and I, I’m not kidding. This is just horrible is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is possibly the most morally wrong piece of software running we’ve got today because basically, the way that Bitcoin works is it works on proof of work, so you have to prove that you’ve done so much compute work to be able to essentially generate and then own.
00:47:51 Speaker 1
Parts of Bitcoins is a simple way layman’s way to explain it, and that’ll be a lot of people in comments correctly on that one. But just to give you an idea right one.
00:48:00 Speaker 1
Single transaction so one Bitcoin transaction uses 688 kilowatt hours.
00:48:08 Speaker 1
Now to put that into Contacts in my house at home, I don’t plug my cars in uses about 12 to 13 kilowatt hours a day and they use 688. Even a US household, which is by far the worst of the world. That’s enough to power one US household for 23 days for one Bitcoin transaction, right? The total.
00:48:26 Speaker 1
Carbon footprint of just Bitcoin.
00:48:30 Speaker 1
Right on an annualized basis is the same as the carbon footprint of Denmark.
00:48:36 Speaker 1
There’s a whole country right for the price of doing one Bitcoin transaction. You can do 817 thousand visa transactions, so to your point, yes, we’re getting more data centers, but I think we need to start thinking a little bit more intelligently about what it is we’re doing in those datacenters and what we’re using them for now. There’s always an argument when we started to look at this metric around data center usage, we started to look at this thing called useful work.
00:48:59 Speaker 1
Because we’re trying to work.
00:49:00 Speaker 1
Well, how much of that energy is actually being used on a processor to do stuff? ’cause obviously there’s losses in the data and then we got this whole ethical dilemma of what’s useful work. Now you would not argue. Obviously, Cancer Research is useful work, but is hosting a particularly dodgy website. Is that useful? Work might be by some peoples ’cause it’s generating revenue for someone to live even though you know how do you look at that? And then there’s the whole video conferencing versus flight. All these other things.
00:49:22 Speaker 1
The mass weight is in favor of putting stuff in the cloud. It’s you know there’s no argument about a lot of things, but then there’s always these outliers like the big.
00:49:30 Speaker 1
Coins and the porn websites and other stuff that people come here with, you know, should we be doing that with this resource? Should we be using this limited resource that we have in terms of all these things were put into making the cloud? Should we be doing that with him so it’s a good question for.
00:49:42 Speaker 2
And then it also that we shouldn’t be trying to navigate to where the tipping point is. That’s frightening.
00:49:48 Speaker 1
So we need to look at cheaper and more sustainable ways to store data.
00:49:51 Speaker 1
We need to look at cheaper and more sustainable ways to compute the Apollo 11 podcast you listen to that one school, 30 minutes, the moon or whatever was done by the BBC.
00:50:00 Speaker 1
Fascinating. One of the episodes things, Episode 4 is all about the computers used to get the moon. Apollo changed our industry from men standing showing you how big their computer was and they had the biggest computer and it’s who’s computer filled the most ruins to the Apollo mission was who could build the smallest computer who could build the most efficient computer and that drive if we don’t have that step. I can’t imagine what we’d like today.
00:50:24 Speaker 1
So you know those kind of things, so I think we need to start again celebrating efficiency celebrating.
00:50:30 Speaker 1
Sustainability. Celebrating the fact that someone’s done something in the best way as opposed to the fastest or biggest way. I think that’s a cultural shift, you know, and that’s something we gotta do.
00:50:39 Speaker 2
So it’s actually it’s not going away, and it’s not getting better, and the challenge and the problems getting larger. I mean that’s pretty daunting, isn’t it? We’re just talking about it.
00:50:50 Speaker 1
Well, yeah, I mean it estimates on to how much global energy goes into running datacenters vary depending on who you read between sort of three and six or 7%, but that’s quite a lot, yeah?
00:50:59 Speaker 1
And we did.
00:51:00 Speaker 1
Have any of that 30 years ago?
00:51:01 Speaker 3
Yeah, I’ve got down.
00:51:03 Speaker 1
Here the ICT is apparently not determine. No, it’s not just you know why ICT was taken out. ’cause ICT was mocked wildly because schools used to have ICT. Yeah, OK and it was knocked by the industry because the people came out of this. Didn’t have any skills. ICT essentially stood for I can type.
00:51:21 Speaker 1
’cause that was essentially what they were teaching. That was what ICT training was. Use word to use PowerPoint. Not only that so they I think they stopped calling it back seat in. Just call it so.
00:51:30 Speaker 3
Yeah, so I’ve got down here that the IT industry accounts for about 3.6% of overall carbon emissions and that 45% of that 3.6 is actually data centers. Yeah, so that’s forgetting all other aspects, manufacture everything. It’s so big challenge, you know, that’s something to think about.
00:51:50 Speaker 1
Yeah, and I don’t think people do think about it. You know, in terms of the impact of what they do, and I think you’ll see more of this. I did I was invited onto a radio show recently and and onto a sustainability show.
00:52:04 Speaker 1
And you know, I went in there to talk about all the stuff I do with my cars and batteries and solar panels. But actually we started getting into software ’cause they want to job. And I think the presenters were stunned ’cause they’ve never actually understood all the stuff that goes on in data centers. Yeah, when I started talking about the stats to do with Bitcoin, they were horrified and then I started to say, well, you know, if you thought about how much energy is used every time you stream a YouTube video.
00:52:26 Speaker 1
You thought about that. Have you thought about maybe using a search engine, Lycos?
00:52:30 Speaker 1
Yeah, which you know uses its its revenue to plant trees as opposed to do other things. Those kind of things I think we’re just starting to get the point where people are realizing the impact of their consumption in that context.
00:52:41 Speaker 3
It’s funny you mention this. Of course, cold players said we’re not going to tour anymore because of the price of aviation and the sustainability of it. Oh yeah, you don’t see them having any issue being on Twitter, Facebook, anything like that when if you’ve got.
00:52:52 Speaker 3
Following that, huge, that’s going to have a huge footprint behind it.
00:52:56 Speaker 1
Could do, but I think you’d argue that that’s probably better than the alternative, which is getting applied.
00:53:00 Speaker 1
Yeah, and we look at you again at VM Ware. We offset our travel obviously, but at the same time we realize that’s not the answer in any way, shape or form. It’s it’s, you know. It’s it’s a nice thing to do, and it’s the responsible thing to do, and you’re planting trees etc to offset it. But actually what we should be doing is just not doing it at all, so we are actively looking in every possible way.
00:53:20 Speaker 1
And starting a culture of non travel you know. So I certainly fly to America a lot less than I used too, which is I think, very nice. Do you think virtual, maybe answer virtuals all?
00:53:30 Speaker 1
I always answer, you know.
00:53:32 Speaker 1
So you’ve mentioned like a lot less travel in the planting of trees. What are the VM Ware doing beyond their commercial offerings to improve the environment? There’s a whole host of stuff. I mean, I’ve already talked about, you know, the general things that we’re doing in terms of the SDG nine goals. But yes, planting trees, yes or the other things that I talked about. You know 100% carbon neutral, 100% renewable energy in terms of what we’re doing here.
00:53:53 Speaker 1
Actively promoting where we can sustainable travel. You’ll see here the office that we sat in. Right now we’re actively promoting with free car, charging in other ways that we support people in getting into more sustainable travel mechanisms.
00:54:04 Speaker 1
Cutting down less travel, you know, just generally trying to do less travel as we do it, but I think there’s more. So what we’re doing at our site in Palo Alto, which is our head office. We have solar generation there, but also we have stuff with water reclamation, a whole bunch of different things, what we’re doing there is we’re going to build that to be entirely off grid. OK, so it will be entirely self sufficient in terms of what we’re doing on our site. But what we realized is.
00:54:26 Speaker 1
In doing that, we can go beyond that and we can start to supply locally, so will actually be positive, and we’re doing well, entirely sustainably.
00:54:33 Speaker 1
But then the more fun thing is was not fun, but actually our head office. There is also a disaster recovery sites. California is one of the buildings hilltop is covered with radios, ’cause it’s you know when all else has failed and apocalypses come. That’s where they’re going to come and operate. The radio stations from, but in a place where there’s earthquakes and fires etc lot. So we’re also going to be a support. Hardware will provide power and water essentially in the event of emergencies.
00:54:55 Speaker 1
So we’re looking to see how we can do that, and then we look at how we can start to take similar actions in in a.
00:55:00 Speaker 1
Places around the world as well, and encouraging. And so there is no limit to what we’re empowering our employees to suggest. We try and do in terms of changing how we how we act sustainably, and you know, little things like going down to marketing and saying, can you stop buying plastic things to hand out to people? Can we find other ways to do that? If you visit our briefing center downstairs, we try to do a lot of our briefings virtually over.
00:55:20 Speaker 1
Zoom, but actually we still have things where people come into the site, but if you come into sight, everyone who comes here. The name badge that they get actually as a seed in it, you can turn their way in plant. Encourage everyone who comes.
00:55:30 Speaker 1
To plant a tree to remember that time at the VM Ware Briefing Center, and I’m not sure that everyone’s going to sit there in 30 years time ago. I remember my 4 hour meeting and stains, but at least you know it’s something. So we. You know, it’s every little way we find some small way of doing something that’s positive in that way. VM World is huge for us. Obviously. You know VM model is a big conference. Conference is incredibly huge environmental impact. Obviously, all the people flying in, so we offset all of that for a start.
00:55:52 Speaker 1
At the same time, we look at how we can be more sustainable each time, better and what we’re doing at VM World. So you don’t all get magic free gifts. You get free gifts if you want to, but we give people.
00:56:00 Speaker 1
Option so you don’t have to take the bag. You have to take the jacket, you know, take whatever we like, what we’re doing with the food, we look, what we’re doing with the you know, literally down to the cutlery. We had no plastic bottles this year for example. And you know, all those things are things that cost to do. They cost time. They cost money. But no one argues them because we know it’s the right thing to do. Yeah, that’s the important thing and that’s what I probably.
00:56:22 Speaker 1
I’m most enthusiastic about about working here for this company is that that’s what we do. It’s just normal. Yeah, you know, someone said let’s do the most sustainable thing was going to send me.
00:56:30 Speaker 3
I might cost differences. Yeah, OK, fine. Next one. So what we’re taking away from that message if Coldplay does one somewhere to play VM World next year, they’re very much welcome and they will be offset. So yeah, we will. We will make sure we get the known as sustainable way.
00:56:44 Speaker 2
That’s incredible and so forward to that.
00:56:47 Speaker 2
That gig, Palo Alto?
00:56:50 Speaker 3
And for a company that’s listening now and just thinking, I’m absolutely inspired by this, I need to change the way that our company works right now. What are the key initiatives?
00:57:00 Speaker 1
Is that you would say just every company needs to take on right now, no questions asked. I think you’ve got to. If you’re inspired by listening to what we talked about, that’s the first thing. And definitely that’s a good start. I think you’ve got to want to do it. OK, I think doing it for the purposes of virtue signaling or CSR corporate social? Yeah, that’s just wrong. OK, it’s like you know.
00:57:20 Speaker 1
Buying electric car? ’cause you think it’s the right thing to do so you can drive it and will smoke but actually, and you’re doing 100 million other things, you gotta want to do it for the right reasons. I think once you then realize that as a company.
00:57:30 Speaker 1
Doing the right thing by sustainability. Doing the right thing by the environment. Doing the right thing by you know the planet I suppose is.
00:57:39 Speaker 1
It’s incredibly inspiring and uplifting for the company and for the employees. You’ll find it helps with retention. You will find people actually want to come and work for your company because you know, I’ve got graduates queuing up because of the image of the company because they know they can make a difference. You know those are the kind of things that matters. People talk about skills, gaps. We talk about retention problems about stuff, but it comes down to one very simple thing. It’s like literally the ability.
00:58:00 Speaker 1
Need to wake up in the morning and sit there and know that what you’re doing is doing something. At least that’s negative. That’s neutral. Impact of the planet, and if anything slightly positive, right and then you can personally not so you can go and tell everyone at parties that you’re really cool and amazing, but that literally that you and yourself can feel happy about that. And so when you’re looking at other companies.
00:58:20 Speaker 1
How do you do that? Was he can’t change your own company overnight? It’s not going to happen, but you can start initiatives and there’s no long long list of those who did that. But starting how you’re procuring stuff, right? That company you?
00:58:30 Speaker 1
Two next, ask them what their sustainability stances right? Ask them for their cloud. Is it everywhere? Is it renewable? What’s the carbon impact of me using your cloud? If I come and buy computers from you, how are you going to ship those computers to me? Where do those computers come from? What’s your company sustainability? How are you trying? Start questioning your supply chain. Start driving down and saying are we being a sustainable as possible in our supply chain? ’cause that’s how you’ll affect change.
00:58:52 Speaker 1
’cause what you’re actually doing then is you are using your money to change other people and that’s what you do right? The only way you’ll if people often come to me, and so you know.
00:59:00 Speaker 1
Can you change this? Can you change that? It’s like, well, actually I’m not giving that person any money, so they’re not going to listen to me. But if you’re choosing whether you give someone their money or someone else their money based on that decision criteria, worlds will change. And I think that’s what’s happening. We start. Some of that has happened through regulation. Some of that happened through, you know, various statutory law that’s being put in, but ultimately people have to want.
00:59:20 Speaker 1
When will to change, you see it happen, right? You know people are stopping buying plastic things in plastic bottles.
00:59:26 Speaker 1
People you know, but we have to start forcing people to stop using plastic bags, which arguably hasn’t really worked. But you know, there’s all those things. There’s different bits and pieces, but you have to chase it in your actions. Agreed wholeheartedly. So I think we’re going to edge towards wrapping this up. Is there anything you guys would like to add? I mean, it’s been hugely insightful and I’m not gonna lie. Pretty scary.
00:59:46 Speaker 3
I mean, so the way the world is.
00:59:47 Speaker 3
Going to what it is what it is.
00:59:49 Speaker 2
What it is and when you look at these kind of sustainability right now at at the top, you know you look at the US and you know Trump and.
00:59:59 Speaker 2
He was just like so anti and then you’ve got this little girl Greta who’s just pretty much punched him in the stomach with the reality and what Jay was saying earlier about the grads this generation. This next generation don’t care about your share price, they want to work for somebody who is thoughtful to the environment.
01:00:20 Speaker 2
Number one.
01:00:21 Speaker 2
And has an agenda, and they’ll be bringing it if it’s not there. But if you want to recruit people in the future, this is standard. Yeah, it’s not. You know it’s not even know we’re flashy, because we do this. It’s a standard that they will just see it as the norm.
01:00:36 Speaker 2
I think it’s it’s a definite revolution and, well, you know I’m a hypocrite to it. To a certain degree I’ve got a plastic bottle. Just sat here. ’cause I was, you know, had disorganized it was in my kit bag and I, you know, I didn’t bring that back.
01:00:51 Speaker 2
My point being is if you don’t try and it’s not, we’re going to solve it overnight. You know, just like in life you know you just go. That’s that’s the first problem going to fix. Let’s do that. Then the next, then the next. If you don’t talk about it planet and actually execute, and it does come from leadership, I see a whole ton talk about sports. I do pictures on sport leadership.
01:01:12 Speaker 2
I see him business. A lack of leadership, right? Plenty of people doing stuff, but nobody making any decisions and what you know. Sustainability is about making a decision. So leadership and then executing on it an. That’s the difference, really. We can fluff around and talk about it. And it’s all you know this has got to happen, but.
01:01:33 Speaker 2
You need to see those you know outcomes.
01:01:36 Speaker 1
Yeah, I think we did the charge. Yeah, we realized that you’re not going to get there in one step, right? You’re not going to get there in 10 steps, but you gotta do special there every step you take is going in the right direction. That’s that’s the simple point. And the other thing I think we killed this stuff that you’ll hear this marketing around. Save the planet, right? I’m a physicist, scientist, event described me.
01:01:55 Speaker 1
So I take a slightly longer view on things and I agree with Brian Cox. The planet will still be here. It’s it’s. It’s all the life on it that will go, yeah, yeah yeah. How fast you want that cycle to accelerate you only have to look at someone like Australia right now. That’s why it’s important to me that I know that I’m doing as much as I possibly can in my personal life and in my professional life. For me to be able to.
01:02:16 Speaker 1
Hold my own head up high in myself when I look in the mirror, not anyone else granted to my children. But actually, you know when I look at the mirror myself, I know that I’ve done the best I can at the moment.
01:02:26 Speaker 2
So long way to go exciting. I think we’re all.
01:02:30 Speaker 2
Trying to reflect is is that you know sustainability, you know. Sat down with Deborah and somebody said, can we just redefine what sustainability means? I’m like wow, we.
01:02:38 Speaker 2
Still, we still at this, but it.
01:02:40 Speaker 2
Was a good point. It was it was very valid, right? As a group we need to work out. What if we say sustainability is? Yeah, but I was still a bit horrified. Thinking God are we at this point like writing it down at the start.
01:02:51 Speaker 2
An it will, if it makes sense, the environment it will be economically better off and then you know just the social impact the whole loop. It ticks all the boxes so crack on so you’re gonna miss out.
01:03:05 Speaker 3
So in that.
01:03:06 Speaker 3
Apocalyptic by think positive note, I think we should probably wrap up guys. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s absolutely brilliant.
01:03:13 Speaker 3
If anyone would like to reach out to you, what’s best method? If you got Twitters and.
01:03:18 Speaker 2
Yeah, do it.
01:03:19 Speaker 2
Is an LinkedIn LinkedIn? I love LinkedIn So what would be your handles?
01:03:23 Speaker 3
What does that mean? What username on Twitter?
01:03:28 Speaker 2
My handles is a grifter or a BMX.
01:03:32 Speaker 2
At Andy gone, so it’s very simple.
01:03:34 Speaker 3
Yeah yeah, and I’m at Joe Bagale. If you can spell it. Yeah, that’s brilliant. And if you want to follow cloud insiders, you can find us on Twitter at Cloud Insiders. And you can also find us on LinkedIn. All episodes are available on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google Podcast or wherever you go to get your podcasts.
01:03:51 Speaker 3
And you can also get them all and cloud insiders dot FM if you’d like to reach out to us or have any ideas for future episodes. You can email team at Cloud Insiders Dot FM gentlemen. Thank you so much for your time and until next time goodbye.