Arab Environment Watch : Japanese advise for green technology in the Middle East

An increasing awareness of the importance of green technologies is slowly spreading in the Arab World, and some opportunities are there to grab by international corporations. Envoys and fact-finders are roaming in the region to identify good opportunities and at the same time provide some good advise to decision makers. If this trend is going to enhance the impact and penetration of sound technology in the region then it is highly welcomed. This is a feature published at the AME Info on Nov 14th regarding one such advise provided by a japanses expert in energy effeciency.

In line with recent regional initiatives to drive adoption of green standards, Hu Yoshida, vice president and chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems, is addressing Middle East businesses on the importance of sustainable energy efficiency this week.

Yoshida's first visit to the region started with Abu Dhabi, Dubai, in Qatar today and Kuwait tomorrow. This is part of the Hitachi and STME Storage Virtualization roadshow. Yoshida's focus is on how virtualization technology can enable CIOs to consolidate systems, significantly cutting down the power required to operate and cool their data centres.

'The environmental impact of technology and the looming power shortage crisis has made energy efficiency a huge priority for businesses and governments worldwide,' says Hu Yoshida.

'We are seeing an increasing number of regional projects that emphasize the focus on environmental sustainability, particularly in real estate developments, such as Qatar's Energy City, the Emirates Green Building Council and Masdar, the 'green city', in Abu Dhabi. The region is clearly heading in the right direction, and along with these developments, it is important for organizations to adopt the technology that complies with this direction. Storage virtualization is such a technology, and its benefits are not yet recognized. Typically, once virtualization is implemented, administrators can manage from three to 10 times more storage capacity.'

Yoshida, as vice president and CTO, is responsible for defining the technical direction for Hitachi Data Systems and currently leads the company's effort to help customers address their Data Life Cycle requirements to address compliance, governance and operational risk issues. He was instrumental in evangelizing Hitachi's unique approach to storage virtualization which leverages existing storage services within the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform and extends it to externally attached, heterogeneous storage systems.

Yoshida is well known within the industry, and his blog (http://blogs.hds.com/hu/) was recently ranked among the 'top 10 most influential' within the storage industry by Network World. Green efficiency continues to be top of his agenda, and a driving force behind the company's ongoing R&D programmes.

Yoshida continues: 'It is important to distinguish between 'green' technology and 'sustainable' technology. The latter is about long-term planning, and investing in a scaleable infrastructure, while saving wasted resources. Storage virtualisation and associated technologies such as thin provisioning allow organisations to consolidate systems and increase utilisation, significantly cutting the power required to both operate and cool their data centres. This has the dual advantage of improving technology's impact on the environment and reducing energy costs.'

In September, Hitachi announced the availability of the Universal Storage Platform VM, which is the only virtualization platform that offers enterprises of any size the opportunity to take back control of heterogeneous storage assets without introducing the reliability and scalability drawbacks of virtualization appliances.