The inaugural IEEE SustainTech Leadership Forum held in August in San Diego, Calif., brought together leaders to explore sustainable technology; exhibits and demonstrations showcasing the latest tech, success stories, and solutions; as well as networking and collaboration opportunities to debate and exchange ideas to advance a sustainable future. The event also debuted a Sustainability Start-Up Pitch Competition, drawing some early-stage sustainability start-ups to compete for recognition. This year’s recipient was Swiss Vault USA, LLC, provider of a best-in-class solution for large data storage.
Led by co-founders Bhupinder Bhullar and Doug Fortune, Swiss Vault highlights the pressing need for sustainable solutions in an ever-growing data-centric world. Computer science and engineering may require an exceptional amount of data storage, as well as intensive data access and analysis operations. The company provides secure long-term storage at very low energy consumption.
Attending SustainTech gave the company the opportunity to interact with industry leaders to both make connections and gain important feedback. “We wanted to be where the sharpest minds in tech and innovation were,” Bhupinder Bhullar, CEO of Swiss Vault, explained. “The technology we’ve developed is so advanced that we can [create skeptics]. When we say we can beat the competition not by one or two percent, but by five times, people question it. The trick is to find and talk to someone technical and tell them our story and exactly what we are doing, and we were able to do that at SustainTech and justify our technology and product,” said Doug Fortune, CTO of Swiss Vault.
Despite facing tough competition, Swiss Vault delivered a compelling presentation, compressing their complex narrative into just five slides and five minutes. “We managed to tell enough of our story to hook the judges,” Bhullar recalled.
One of the things that set Swiss Vault apart is the fact that it’s a product that solves an issue that impacts just about everyone— managing growing volumes of data. As Fortune pointed out, the data industry is massive—valued at $100 billion—but plagued by inefficiencies and escalating carbon emissions. Case in point, in Silicon Valley, data centers consume approximately 30 percent of the electrical power, according to Bhullar. “Everyone is concerned about energy consumption, and we need to come up with ways to make data storage more sustainable, using less energy and less space,” he stated.
And that’s what Swiss Vault has done. Their technology offers a solution that significantly reduces energy consumption and physical space required for data storage. Rather than relying on traditional 200-watt processors, their hardware operates on a mere five watts. This efficiency allows them to process large amounts of data within a compact system, for example an Edge Node – about the size of a deck of cards to units containing 2,000 disks.
Additionally, Swiss Vault’s solution helps eliminate waste. Data centers today must replace their disks and servers every three to five years because there is an increased chance of failure over time, resulting in data loss. This replacement cycle is very costly and wasteful over the years. “Our software removes the component of data loss altogether because of the way it distributes data,” said Bhullar. “So, with our systems, you can set them up, and let them run, and forget about them. So, we’re saving capital expenses, but also, more importantly, reducing the electronic waste that the industry has been pushing out.”
As the winners of the 2024 SustainTech Start Up Pitch Competition, Swiss Vault sees the recognition as a jumpstart to advancing its mission to help data owners save money, time and energy on data storage. “We need to get the word out about what we’ve achieved and how it can help various organizations,” Bhullar emphasized. “With this tech we built, it’s helping any community and organization. It can be empowering, as more organizations can own their own data.”
With a commitment to sustainability and innovation, Swiss Vault is poised to help advance data storage and management. Their success in the SustainTech competition demonstrates they have a solution to help solve a critical industry issue, which bodes well for the company, the industry, and the global landscape.
