SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Shruti Sethi
Senior PM
Microsoft
Shruti Sethi is a Zealous professional having a deep experience in both computing and storage systems. She has 12+ years industry experience working extensively on Graphics power management, workload management, setting performance targets and Data Center storage hardware. She is currently most vested into End-to-End Cost Optimized Storage, Efficient Storage Management techniques, Pricing for Storage Services and simultaneously driving Sustainability in Storage Solutions. Shruti is a part of the strategy product team driving the next wave of initiatives in AZURE STORAGE. She is also the Steering Committee Representative of Open Compute Project's Sustainability Projects and strives to push industry Sustainability work. Shruti has a Master of Science in Computer Architecture from Georgia Institute of technology and an MBA from University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business).
Related Sessions
Smarter Cloud Storage—Optimizing Costs with Tiering and Automation
As organizations increasingly rely on cloud storage, managing costs without sacrificing performance has become essential. Fortunately, cloud providers now offer smart features to optimize storage spend—most notably through access tiers and lifecycle management policies.
Storage tiering aligns your data with the right storage class—hot, cool, or archive—based on access frequency. Even better, lifecycle policies and intelligent tiering tools automate data movement across tiers as your workload changes, minimizing manual effort. Modern cloud platforms also offer rich telemetry and analytics, revealing data usage patterns and cost drivers. Paired with AI-powered recommendations, these insights empower users to make proactive, data-driven storage decisions.
Together, these tools reduce costs, simplify operations, and support a more efficient, sustainable cloud strategy. This presentation will highlight how to harness tiering, automation, and AI to unlock greater value from your cloud storage—and make every gigabyte count.
Panel: Driving Sustainability in Datacenters – Standardizing Carbon Assessment Methodologies
As the demand for cloud services continues to grow, so does the environmental impact of datacenters. Accurately measuring and managing carbon emissions is essential to advancing sustainability goals—but today’s approaches to carbon assessment vary widely across the industry. The panelists include Sustainability experts from Google, Meta, and Microsoft to discuss how the cloud industry can align on Product Category Rules (PCRs) and Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) standards to drive consistency, transparency, and real impact. PCRs serve as foundational guidelines for conducting LCAs, the methodology used to quantify the carbon footprint of devices and services. With a standardized PCR framework, cloud providers can perform have comparable, credible, and actionable carbon assessments —supporting better decision-making across procurement, design, and operations. Our panelists will explore the current state of carbon accounting practices in datacenters, highlight challenges in today’s fragmented landscape, and share insights into collaborative efforts underway to build unified sustainability frameworks. Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of how the industry can move from individual initiatives to collective impact, accelerating progress toward net-zero ambitions through measurable, standardized carbon assessment.
Sustainability Opportunities for Cloud Storage
As Cloud industry gears up towards attacking Climate Change – identifying the sources of carbon and other associated impacts is a needed first step to device a plan of action to further sustainability improvements. The cloud storage market is expected to exceed $390B by 2028; hence a key area of focus to reduce Data Center Climate Impact. As a leading force in the cloud solution sector, we recognize the environmental implications. It is our commitment to use this knowledge not just to acknowledge the challenge, but to forge innovative solutions and strategies to minimize our carbon footprint and maximize sustainable practices. In our journey towards a sustainable future, we believe that data center storage can be a part of the solution. The focus of this presentation is to highlight the biggest influencers for cloud Storage Sustainability and delve into the storage building blocks and component areas that are the key contributors to cloud storage carbon footprint. The presentation will spotlight areas for industry to focus on to make a positive impact on sustainability from a Microsoft’s perspective.
DNA Data Storage "End-to-End" System Concept
The Global Storage market is growing at a CAGR of 17.8% (Ref: Fortune Business Insights). While current storage technologies are still satisfying the current capacity needs, the explosive growth in the digitization of information has warranted research and analysis into new futuristic media, such as molecular/DNA storage, that can scale to large capacity with much lower carbon impact.
In this session, we will present a concept of an end-to-end DNA Data Storage System that can function independently, is integrated with automation, and can be deployed at scale. We will describe a) the building blocks of a DNA Data Storage System; b) the abstract interface model between the functional blocks in an end-to-end system c) selecting and configuring DNA equipment blocks (codec, write, store, retrieve, read) when designing such an end-to-end system; and d) the power, liquid plumbing, waste management and other resources/support required by such a system. The main takeaway of this session is to describe a conceptual storage system that can be built using the DNA equipment blocks and how interoperability could be achieved for its real life application.
Sustainability Initiatives by Open Compute Project – 3 Categories of work for Pro-Sustainability Design and Circular Economy in Storage
Open Compute Project’s (OCP) Sustainability Project was established in ~2020 as Datacenter Sustainability gained more and more importance. It has since spawned multiple workstreams working on different aspects of Sustainability in devices and are essential to enabling circular economy in Datacenter. Sustainable design encompasses a multitude of categories ranging from reduced power usage, power telemetry, carbon efficiency metrics, elongating lifespan of competitive use or telemetry for carbon metrics. This session will be delving into 3 broad but essential categories of work, which OCP has started exploring – Power Profile & Sustainability Metrics, Standardizing LCA methodology & Carbon Transparency and Tradeoffs to enable Circular Reuse.
All these 3 areas of work especially apply to Storage in Datacenters. In context of these 3 areas of work, we will discuss the crucial hurdles in enabling transparency of carbon-impact and implementing a circular economy. This is especially significant for Storage Media as they have particular concerns with circular reuse due to Security and TCO considerations . We will discuss the goals of each of these 3 categories of work and how they may help Design for Sustainability for Storage, by resolving some of the barriers faced.