Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Major cloud providers have committed to lowering carbon emissions by 2030 across their datacenters, and research has contributed many ideas on how this may be achieved. However, a major contributor to datacenter emissions has not received enough attention: storage. Storage --- everything from file storage to inter-application messaging in datacenters --- causes 33% of operational emissions and 61% of embodied emissions in Azure's general-purpose cloud, based on a recent study. This paper identifies key sources of both operational and embodied emissions within distributed storage in datacenters. We also discuss strategies to reduce storage emissions and their challenges due to storage's fundamentally stateful nature.
Institutions: Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft (United States)
Language: English
Topic: Green IT and Sustainability
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4409561795