How Using Spare Capacity for Data Storage is Better for the Environment
A research paper identifying the factors and calculating the impact of data storage on carbon emissions.
Abstract
The global datasphere is large and growing rapidly. Storage and distribution of that data already represents a significant and growing contributor to global carbon. While much attention is given to the amount of electricity consumed in powering and cooling data storage devices, it is important to note that the carbon and overall environmental impact from the manufacture and transport of storage devices is often as big or bigger than their ongoing operation. Additionally there is evidence that the vast majority of drives are severely underutilized and could be put into operation for data storage. It takes almost no additional electricity or cooling to run a drive at near full capacity versus partial capacity. Thus, significant carbon savings can be achieved by enabling already powered and deployed drives to be more fully utilized during their lifetime.
This report also surfaces that additional significant carbon savings can be achieved by:
- Increasing the effective life and utilization of already manufactured drives.
- Minimizing the number of copies of data that need to be storeda. to achieve equivalent data durability levels.b. to achieve equivalent global geographic distribution and performance levels.
- Enabling a carbon efficient distribution of storage between HDD and SSD.
Storj is a system that is designed to provide enterprise grade, S3 compatible cloud object storage by leveraging underutilized capacity from independently operated
drives around the world. This research paper identifies the carbon costs of centralized cloud storage, evaluates the ways that Storj operates differently, and presents a model to estimate carbon footprint savings from using Storj as compared to hypercloud and traditional data center storage.
The model produces estimates of significant carbon savings of 66-83% per 1 TB of enterprise data over a three year period. This is equivalent to greater than 200kg CO2/TB.