Alternative cooling techniques and renewable energy sourcing typically come to mind in terms of making data centers better for the environment, but the impacts of data center hardware are often overlooked in favor of the tech cycle's "beauty contest" spearheaded by industry giants Intel and AMD.

And treating hardware like a commodity, as SoftIron VP of Product Craig Chadwell described it, creates a host of sustainability-related challenges for businesses, he told SDxCentral in an interview.

Commodity hardware used by much of the industry is updated frequently enough that in the rush to get their hands on the latest and greatest hardware available, organizations barely have the time to consider the impacts of these release cycles, like an increased amount of end-of-life hardware.

"And then on the software-defined infrastructure side, there's a tendency to assume that the latest and greatest hardware is always going to be what you build on," Chadwell said. This perspective feeds into a software development mindset built on assumptions that "a CPU clock cycle is cheap unto free. And as we're learning, that's just not true."

SoftIron's HyperDrive storage platform, in contrast to commodity hardware models, was designed from the beginning "to do one thing and do one thing exceptionally well," Chadwell said.

"Then you build an ecosystem around that platform so that it makes it very easy to use. And then you make open source a core fundamental of that platform so that businesses who adopt your technology never get stuck," he said.

Even if SoftIron as a company ceases to exist, the hardware will still operate more efficiently and effectively because its open source foundation allows users to "migrate their technology and infrastructure from one vendor to another without having to replatform other aspects of the application stack," Chadwell explained.

This means SoftIron is able to "outperform those software-defined models based on both performance ... and around the efficient use of storage in terms of the wattage per terabyte of data stored," he explained.

The company's latest carbon footprint report shows its HyperDrive storage platform avoids 292 metric tons of carbon emissions for each 10-petabyte cluster running on its tech.

SoftIron's approach to sustainability isn't just about sustainable hardware. "It's about sustainable products and sustainable operating models for businesses that we use ourselves, and sustainable data center operating practices, which we encourage through our products and our product strategy," Chadwell said.

"Our core premise is that you can build a platform that is optimized for the work that it is performing. In this case when I say work that is performed, what I'm really talking about is infrastructure software," he explained.