Working Toward a Sustainable Future

It is becoming increasingly clear that companies and individuals alike must move towards shaping a more sustainable future. At Veritas, sustainability is essential to our mission, our technologies, and our community. That’s why we promote corporate sustainability within our own operations as well as our partners and supply chain.

The rapidly evolving landscape of backup technology offers us a number of opportunities to grow our contributions to sustainability as well as our effect on the sustainability of IT as a whole. Last year, Veritas commissioned research with Vanson Bourne to explore how sustainability is growing in importance to organizations and how IT considers sustainability. The conclusion was clear, as almost all (99%) plan to increase the workloads that are run in a cloud environment over the next three years, with (98%) attributing the shift to their sustainability strategies. The move to a more sustainable cloud is already upon us, and with it, we are prepared to deliver industry-leading backup and recovery with new capabilities to dramatically reduce cost and energy consumption.

With the release of NetBackup 10 powered by Cloud Scale technology, customers can take advantage of unified data protection management coupled with elastic backup from snapshots and a deduplication engine. Together, these features can reduce the storage footprint in the cloud by 98%. Agentless backup from snapshots is a new service that provides cloud-optimized, lower-cost data protection in AWS and Azure. By utilizing the Cloud Policy Engine, backup processes can be automated based on established criteria pre-defined by the backup administrator. This elastic service is dynamically provisioned as required, maximizing cloud efficiency, and making use of lower-cost tiers of storage. Elastic Backup from Snapshots works in conjunction with the new cloud dedupe engine eliminating storage redundancies. In NetBackup 10, the Deduplication Engine has been optimized with improved efficiency, compressing more data, and utilizing less memory than ever before—allowing your cloud resources to go further.

Harnessing the power of efficient storage through backup from snapshots and elastic deduplication is critical to reducing the cost of backup data in the cloud. In fact, US Grid Emissions Factor data suggests that storing just 1 petabyte of unoptimized backup data in the cloud for one year could create as much as 3.5 metric tons of CO2 waste. The 98% reduction achieved with NetBackup 10 amounts to a 3.42 metric ton reduction of CO2 for each petabyte managed responsibly. To further illustrate the significance of that figure, it’s approximately the same amount of emissions that are generated by driving an average family car from the North Pole to the South Pole.

Don't believe us? See for yourself!

• Amount of CO created by burning 1 gallon of gasoline: 8,887 grams (about the weight of a car tire) or 0.008887 metric tons (2014 EPA study) 
• Average fuel economy of a family car: 32 mpg (CarbonFootprint.com)
• Distance from the North Pole to the South Pole: 12,430 miles

(12,430 miles / 32 miles/gallon) * 0.008887 metric tons CO2 = 3.45 metric tons CO2

Veritas’s commitment to sustainability extends to our entire organization. This was codified last Earth Day with the announcement of Emissions Reduction Targets, aiming to reduce scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions 25% by FY2025 from a FY2019 base year. Through the effort of our sustainability strategy, we are pleased to report that Veritas greenhouse gas emissions fell 27% in FY2021 from FY2020 for the company’s entire value chain (scope 1, 2, and 3) driven by the procurement of Renewable Energy Certificates.

Another component of this effort has been the implementation of recycling of servers and storage devices. In FY21, Veritas sent 57 tons of material to our vendor which after processing resold 61 percent of available material. The resale of these goods also eliminated the manufacture of new units and averting: 8 million Kgs of Co2 emissions, the use of 4 billion liters of water, and 52 million tons of mined earth. While we are well on our way to achieving our emissions targets, explaining our investment in sustainability will continue to play a vital role in our company's future.

Climate change is a threat to future generations but also an immense opportunity. Everyone can play an active role in the solution. Read more about Veritas’ commitment to  Environmental Sustainability in Supply Chain processes and at Veritas Facilities. Make sure you are future-proofing your IT environment by future-proofing the planet, start by downloading the latest version of Veritas NetBackup from our trialware page to test the best-in-class enterprise backup and recovery. With NetBackup 10, reduce the data you store and create a more sustainable future for the planet.