Tips: Simple steps to reduce your internet energy consumption (and Co2 emission)

As highlighted in my previous blog post, Internet and Data Centers are huge energy consumers and therefore a significant source of CO2 emissions, up to 1 or 2 % of global emissions, almost as much as the Airlines industry.

As promised at the end of that earlier post, and as your use of electronic cloud storage, internet surfing, email communication, social networks, audio and video conferencing, music or video streaming (etc.)  consumes a lot of energy, let me give you a few tips and steps you can take to reduce your personal internet carbon footprint:

Cloud storage:

as you are dumping your photos, videos, music and back-up data into the Cloud, whatever Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, iDrive, pCloud, Amazon Cloud, DropBox or other provider, look at how many GigaBites you store there – 10 GB, 100GB, 500GB, 1TB ? – All that storage occurs on servers somewhere, and those servers need energy to run. Data centers that house all this storage run 24/7, with redundancy back-up, require massive amounts of energy to process your data and to cool the servers. So, the first easy step is just to go over your photos, videos, music, documents, sort it and do a spring cleaning, getting ready of what is useless, too old or redundant, that you’ve been clutting over the years and will never use. It is not fun, it takes time, but it is efficient. To lead by example, I did some yesterday and saved 20GB of Cloud Storage (and of my laptop storage capacity which is almost full at 500GB). Another Tip: If your computer, tablet or phone, backs up photos and videos automatically to Google Photos: To make sure to reduce space, by resizing them, Go to Preferences menu, look under Photo and video upload size and select High Quality (free unlimited storage). Google will shrink photos to 16 megapixels and videos to a resolution of 1080p. Although this may reduce image quality a bit, most photos and videos will still look great. Apple and iPhone users can do the same on Apple iCloud. And last but not least, decide which files you really want to keep and upload in your cloud.  Stop automatically syncing everything. Keep a folder for important backups, and only sync that to your cloud storage. Just a heads-up, there is a big chance that you may be duplicating some cloud storage of the same files in several providers, ie on Google Drive and Apple iCloud.

Email:

Your Email box is yet another dirty and full closet, with thousands of files clutter up servers, some of them 10 or 20 years old, archived or not, with or without attachments, attachments that you probably already saved anyway if they had any value at that time, they still suck-up energy unnecessarily. Again there is an easy fix, whatever you use Outlook, CleanEmail, Gmail, Hotmail, Apple Mail, or other, just go back in time and get rid of old emails which have no value today, specially sort by size of emails and attachments so you can prioritize and get rid of the bigger ones, and save space. I do it regularly, still my Outlook file is 17GB, including archives. Also delete all spam, advertising emails daily, junk, unsubscribe from useless newsletter, promotions and notifications you received daily, weekly or monthly and you never open. Finally use the function to only download images from the emails received and open images only when you decide too, this will reduce your internet and network consumption. And keep in mind that all in all sending a single email results in about a gram of CO2 being released into the atmosphere.

Social Media:

If you’re a social media addict as I am, you probably have accounts Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, What’s App, YouTube, TikTok (I have all of them)… so now is the time to purge your social media: just go to settings of the apps, and download an archive of your data before you delete it online. It is good practice anyway to clean-up your digital history, as it’s stay there forever, like it or not, until you delete it (sometime you can’t even do that). I will not go into the details of each platform, but as an example on Tweeter, you can download your archive by opening Twitter Settings on the web and choosing Your account and Download an archive of your data. You can also use tools such as Tweet Delete or Tweet Deleter. For Facebook and Instagram there are  limited options for deleting older posts, but you can still delete old posts manually one by one though, and you can also make use of the Stories feature on where posts automatically disappear after 24 hours anyway.

Online Activity:

whatever browser you use, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer Edge, Firefox or Safari, there is way to reduce your consumption by using some of the tools, settings and auto-deletion of your browser. As an example, log into your Google account, click “Data & personalization” about your online activity, your search history, and your location—both to personalize your experience of its apps and to serve up targeted ads. In all of these categories, you can select the Auto-delete option to have the data erased.

Streaming:

Audio and video streaming is one of the worst when it comes to power use and carbon emission: Just In the US, streaming music dumps between 25,000 to 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. Now with people moving more and more to IPTV, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Hulu, Roku, AppleTV and others, streaming services are exploding and are making it worst. As highlighted on my precedent blog post, Visiting Amazon consumes 0.0003 kWh, streaming 5 MB MP3 song takes 0.025 kWh, watching 5 minutes YouTube video takes 0.065 kWh, streaming 3 GB movie takes 14.65 kWh, and online video game takes about 78.13 kWh. Therefore be aware and use streaming service appropriately. You can also reduce the resolution of the video quality when streaming on your phone, you don’t really need High Definition Resolution on such a small screen.

In conclusion,

making it an habit to spend a few minutes to one hour monthly to reduce your cloud storage space, cleaning your emails, deleting some online activity history and social media posts, streaming reasonably will reduce your carbon footprint and our planet will feel a bit better. We live in a digital smarter world, let’s also make it greener.

Data Centers and internet are some of the worst energy consumers and polluters, True or False?

Think about it: Every time you use Facebook,  Messenger, Instagram, What’sApp, Snapchat or TikTok or every time you launch a google search, order on Amazon, pay your bills via online banking, or just receive, send or archive an email, or stream music or videos, or sit in a zoom meeting, or almost whatever you do on your computer, tablet or phone, you are using internet resources hosted in Data Centers which means you are consuming electricity and generating CO2; How much? That’s THE  Question, so here is some background information based on well known studies and reports:

Data Centers are the Brain of the Internet, they host servers, computers, storage, controllers, network devices, and cooling systems all powered by electricity power, in order to connect, receive, process, compute, share, duplicate and store data, more and more data and higher flowing every day.

Data Center

We estimate an average energy consumption in a Data Center of 3% for the network, 11% for the storage, 43 % for the servers and 43% for the cooling and power systems.

As the number of internet and IT users is growing and the flow of data is exploding, with more and more audio and video streaming, more highly consuming Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more and more Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors are deployed, so are data services and Data Centers growing exponentially and so is the energy consumption growing alarmingly.

Calculating the global energy consumption of these Data Centers and of the Internet is a complex problem requiring some estimations, as companies and countries are not really providing detailed reports.

Estimates varie depending on the following relevant studies and sources:

• Koomey in 2011 estimated that data centers accounted for between 1.1 percent and 1.5 percent of global electricity used in 2010.
• Masanet et Al in 2020 estimates that global data centers consumed around 205 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2018, or over 1 percent of global electricity use,
• Estimates of annual data center electricity usage vary from 200 terawatt hours (TWh) (Jones, 2018) to 500 TWh (Bashroush & Lawrence, 2020). The lower of these figures would suggest that data centers consume 1% of global electricity (Jones, 2018), but this could be significantly higher. One study suggests that global data center energy usage was 270 TWh in 2012 (Van Heddeghem et al, 2014). Another study estimates that 104 TWh will be used by European Union data centers in 2020, which makes a global total of 200 TWh unlikely (Avgerinou, Bertoldi & Castellazzi L, 2017).
• Wildly varying estimates for the energy intensity of the internet have been published, ranging from 136 kWh/GB in 2000 to 0.004 kWh/GB in 2008, but a more recent estimate analysing calculation methodologies settled on 0.06 kWh/GB for 2015 (Aslan et al, 2018). This is decreasing by 50% every 2 years (Aslan et al, 2018).
• Calculating the energy intensity of the internet is difficult – Aslan et al (2018) only considers fixed line networks in developed countries. Calculations are missing for mobile networks that will account over 20% of all internet traffic by 2022, growing at 46% per year (Cisco, 2019); and internal connectivity within data centers is not included but is doubling every 12-15 months (Singh et al, 2015). These excluded factors and no recent calculations examining networking equipment speeds up to current fastest 400Gb (Ethernet Alliance, 2019) devices means that it is difficult to estimate the true energy impact of networking today.

Some of these numbers may seems wrong as the percentage is decreasing despite the fact that the volume is increasing, but it just means that fortunately the significant improvement energy efficiency of the devices and data centers, as well and new technologies such as server virtualization and Cloud-Computing and Cloud-Storage have been compensating for the growth of users and data of the last decade.

Internet

The amount of computing done in data centers more than quintupled between 2010 and 2018. However, the amount of energy consumed by the world’s data centers grew only six percent during that period, thanks to improvements in energy efficiency. Servers, storage, and network hardware on its own consumed more energy in 2018 (130TWh) than it did in 2010 (92TWh). But these devices are now much more energy and a lot more computing efficient for every 1Wh used.

Still, The main issue is this hungry use of electricity generate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Again we can only estimate the level produced as it depends on many factors.

In 2018 Pearce claimed that the world’s data centers emit as much CO2 as the global aviation industry (which generates 3% of global emissions) , which is roughly 900 billion kilograms of CO2 (Air Transport Action Group 2020). Considering that global data centers recently consumed around 205 billion kWh, for this claim to be true, their average electricity emissions intensity would have to be around 4.4 kg CO2/kWh. Which is probably overestimated as fortunately all Data Centers don’t run on electricity produced by coal or fuel. Lately the larger providers such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and big Telcos are using more and more renewable energy or implementing their giant Data Centers in Nordiks countries to reduce cooling energy and cost. The new industry trend is for multi-tenant data centers to accommodate hyperscale cloud firms and fulfill growing demand from technologies such as AI and IoT.

Just a few others facts that may ring a bell:

• In 2020 Kamiya claimed that watching Netflix for 30 minutes generates 1.6 kg of CO2 emissions, the same as driving almost four miles/6 km. Again even if this value is a bit overestimated, it gives an idea we can relate to.
• Visiting Amazon consumes 0.0003 kWh, streaming 5 MB MP3 song takes 0.025 kWh, watching 5 minutes YouTube video takes 0.065 kWh, streaming 3 GB movie takes 14.65 kWh, and online video game takes about 78.13 kWh

In 2016 Koomey-led study of data center energy use in the US, which was paid for and published by the US Department of Energy, found that collectively, all data centers in America consumed 2 percent of all electricity consumed nationwide.

Fortunately the last 20 years have seen major efficiency improvements, but unfortunately they are predicted to come to an end and the data center energy usage is predicted to double by 2030. If electricity continues to be a major source of data center energy and is generated from non-renewable sources, data center emissions could exceed the aviation industry which is currently responsible for 2% of annual human-generated CO2 (IATA, 2020).

The Internet’s energy consumption, whatever 1 or 2% of global energy consumption is significant but still is a fraction of that of the transportation industry, (including cars, trucks, bus, trains, planes etc) which accounts for 61 percent of oil consumption, and of course the worst energy consumers and polluters industries are Chemical, Refining and Mining industries.

power generation

Therefore on a positive note as Internet uses less power and causes a smaller environmental impact than transportation, moving more tasks (like teleconferencing, telebanking and working from home) to the Internet to reduce travel and commute makes sense.

And on that note: numbers will certainly show a reduction of travel and transportation and an increase on internet use due to Covid-19 pandemic for 2020, and a consequent shift on energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

Every day Internet and technology are progressing with a devices and new services. The computing power is increasing and so is the energy consumption of these devices. Our mobiles, computers, laptops, and other gadgets rely on energy to operate all the time (About 0.0003 kWh is consumed while charging a mobile over USB for 7 minutes).

In the future the rapidly growing demand for information service and compute-intensive applications like AI and IoT (enabled by 5G, and 6G to come) will certainly outpace the efficiency gains, therefore significant investments in renewable power will be required to minimize the climate implications of data center energy use.

Objective of this blog was to raise your awareness on the energy consumption and C02 emission of the IT Industry and Internet and it’s potential impact on environment and climate change, as we are all users and consumers.

In my next blog I will share a few tips of how to reduce your personal internet usage, energy consumption and emissions.

Is your datacenter ready for BYOD ? (Bring-Your-Own-Device)

I remember a time where my employer was paying for my mobile phone, my laptop and my internet provider…With the reduction of IT budgets and the evolution of mobile technologies, the times are changing and the working habits are changing: the time of carrying 2 phones, your personal phone and a phone provided by your employer, and the time of the employer providing a free smartphone you may like, those times are over, and therefore more and more people are now bringing their own mobile device, smartphone, tablet or laptop, to their workplace, and more and more companies implement a Bring-Your-Own-Device policy  (BYOD).

However it means IT has to manage new and more devices; In a budget perspective it means IT is replacing CAPEX (Capital expenses) for OPEX (Operational Expenses).

A recent survey from CDW, shows that IT managers surveyed report that 89% of their employees use personally owned mobile devices for work.

But is your enterprise ready for it? And is your Datacenter ready for BYOD?

BYOD requires a strategy, process and policies, as well as hardware and software platforms, and applications, to secure, support and manage these new devices and endpoints.

So what are the challenges facing your organization?

What are your user’s expectations?

What are the benefits for your organisation?

What do you have to do to be successful?

 

1- The Challenges facing your organization and Datacenter

A new survey conducted in EMEA showed that 70% of the enterprises surveyed allowed their employee to bring their own devices, 40% allowing access to corporate applications and 30% allowing only access to internet.

First challenges that come to mind are, of course are bout security and bandwidth, in fact they come in that order: Employee device introducing a virus, Employee losing a device with critical data, Employee staling data.. but there are more. Here are the details results of this survey about those challenges:

– 20%: Securely connect employee device

– 18%: Ensure mobile device security

– 16%: Establish a corporate policy for acceptable use

– 14%: Enforce access rights, based on user, device and application

– 11%: Build enough wireless coverage and capacity (bandwidth)

– 10%: Avoid the use of more IT resources

– 9%: Evaluate the business benefit relative to risk

We can add a few more challenges you will be facing like policy enforcement, physical theft, malware prevention, IT support increase, storage infrastructure readiness, education …

 

2- What are the benefits of BYOD for your organization?

The BYOD brings some challenges but also provide some benefits:

– Increase in employees productivity and job satisfaction

– Reduced number of devices to purchase and support

– Reduced set-up and training time and cost, employees using devices and tools they like and know how to use

– Reduce maintenance of devices (employees take better care of their personal devices)

– Improve communication between field and office personnel as well as increased availability to customers – resulting in better customer service.

– Improve Work-Life balance of your workforce

The CDW survey also shows that 67% of small business mobile device users believe their company would lose competitive ground without mobile devices, and 94% believe their mobile devices make them more efficient.

85% of IT managers believe that mobile devices make their company more efficient.

 

3- What are the users expectations?

Based on a Forester research, 60% of companies offer BYOD, and Gartner predicts it will be 90% by 2014, accessing company data with at least 2 mobile devices.

Users love to be able to use their own device at work, not to carry multiple devices, they understand the security, policies and management challenges it generate, however they hate having to keep entering 8 digits passwords for each app., specially when it requires special characters (!)

The chart describe quite well some of the key users expectations:

– Users do not want their personal data to risk to be wiped-out

– Users do not want to have to enter enterprise passwords for personal apps

– Users want to be able to keep using personal apps as facebook, twitter, iCloud, Pandora, Spotify, dropbox etc.

Best scenario would be to create virtual separation on mobile devices applying different policies to personal and company data.

 

4- What do you have to do to be successful?

– Define a BYOD Strategy

– Create and communicate clear and strong policies and guidelines

– Educate your employees on Cybersecurity

– Plan for network bandwith and storage

– Secure personal mobile devices to protect your network and data accordingly

– Implement a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution.

– Implement a Mobile Application Management (MAM) solutions

– Other option is to contract a managed service solution from a service providers, ie in the cloud managed services solution

– Approve any mobile device being used in your business

– Have a separate network designed solely for BYOD devices

– Optimize your web platform for mobile devices and offer mobile apps for your business to your employee and to your clients

– Monitor results: security, performance, resources, cost, employee and customer satisfaction.

 

In summary, Does BYOD make sense for all businesses? Probably not. Different organisations have different business needs and security requirements and Risk policies.

Does it always provide all benefits promised? Probably not. Some businesses will get more benefits than others. As an example, about Capex vs Opex expenditures, Kris Lovejoy, VP of IBM IT Risk Management, declared at the recent Reboot Ottawa Conference that IBM spends more on securing and managing employees purchased devices than they do on those provided by the company, even when cost of the device has been factored in.

BYOD has become one of the main drivers of IT and Network transformation, it poses some serious challenges to IT organisations and to datacenters but it can be successfully managed and the benefits are real and worth embracing it. However One Size Does Not Fit All !

I mainly work from my home office, but tomorrow I will bring to my company corporate office my own BlackBerry Bold and my own Blackberry Playbook tablet to work, but will still bring my company owned Lenovo laptop. They’re better be ready, I know they really are as a matter of fact, but ARE YOU READY?

and IS YOUR DATACENTER READY FOR  BYOD?

Key Trends for Data Centers Transformation in 2011 – Next-Gen Data Centers

Times are changing and IT is leading the transformation:

 IT organizations, are pressurized between improved performances expectations, growing data and network bandwidth, cost reduction targets, converged architectures and technology innovations. As a results all large enterprises and SMB have a common short term objective to transform their data center to become a `Next-Gen Data Center. For this there are some key steps to take and here are some major trends we can predict to achieve this transformation in 2011 and beyond:

– More performant, cost effective, energy efficient hardware platforms:

 From the silicon semi-conductor & processors, to the servers, to the data storage, to the networking switches, to the rack or data center cooling systems, at all level some very competitive and innovative offerings are coming to market from major vendors as well as start-ups with more performance, cheaper price, and more specially more energy efficient hardware platforms, helping to reduce the cost of acquisition (Capex) and of operating (OPEX) a data center.

– Consolidation:

Servers & Data Centers Consolidation simplify IT workload and the management of complex IT infrastructure, optimize floor space, power and cooling, and staffing while providing required flexibility to rapidly adapt to changing business needs. Combining multiple data centers into a single facility is a primary strategy for cutting costs while improving service levels.

 

– Virtualization:

With the economic recovery, Industry Analysts predicts an increase on IT spending in 2011,and we can predict that much of the data center transformation spending will be around virtualization. Virtualization of servers, storage, networks and applications will provide many benefits including cost savings and consolidation, energy consumption reduction, as well as the flexibility to meet new business requirements.

– Cloud Computing:

The Hype is over, mature and competitive offerings are available from serious vendors and providers, market acceptance is growing and SMB as well as major enterprises will be starting to deploy cloud platforms and leverage cloud architecture and services for some critical Web 2.0 applications in what some people call a “Data Center without Walls”.

 

– Modular design:

To reduce the cost and time to build a data center and to reduce the space required, a shift will operate to standard modular data center designs, instead of traditional floor-raised design, specifically built for each customer.

– Key Performance Indicators:

Performance measurements and metrics will be more important, KPI will be developed and adopted to better measure performance, capacity planning, change control processes, system utilization, efficiency, energy consumption, and sustainability, moving to the Green Data Center vision, using renewable energy.

 

 

In summary,

Energy Efficiency, Cost Reduction, and Flexibility are the Key words for 2011 and the design and operations management of next-gen data center tends toward these requirements. Data Center transformation will be achieved through next-gen energy efficient hardware platforms, consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing, green initiatives, modular designs and best measurement practices, to enable organizations to quickly and cost effectively respond to market demands and new revenue opportunities.

Are you ready to lead  the transformation to next-gen data center ?

5- We Need Smarter and Greener Telecommunications Networks

You probably know that the electricity used to power all computing Data Centers in the world generate more CO2 emissions than the Air Transportation industry, despite all these planes burning huge quantities of  jet-fuel in our skies!     

Green Telecom Network Capex, World Markets, 2009-2014

 

 Therefore reducing data center power usage is one of the strategic focus of any CIO or Data Center manager, as well as for all computers, servers, storage vendors, not just for the satisfaction of being  Green but also and first to reduce operating cost as power is one of the major cost of operating a Data Center.     

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) & Operators have a double challenge as they also need to reduce the power consumption of their Network Operation Center (NOC), especially now that fixed and mobile communications are growing fast, the volume of data transmitted is exploding and their network is quickly expanding to satisfy the demand.     

Telecom Networks have become a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions and growth, and all CSPs are being challenged to reduce their carbon emissions , to use more energy-efficient hardware to power their network elements (micro-processors, servers, storage, network switches vendors are being challenged to manufacture and sell more energy-efficient equipments), to use new  and more efficient cooling technologies, to optimize their resource with virtualization technologies, to use renewable energy, to Recycle & Reuse, in a nutshell to be Smarter and Greener.     

Most of them today are putting a lot of effort and resources in greener initiatives to meet these challenges, to reduce their energy usage and carbon emissions, which in the end will improve their Capital Expenses (Capex) and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their network and also dramatically reduce their operating expenses (Opex).     

A recent report from Pike Research, Cleantech Market Intelligence, addresses in much detail all the following questions:     

•             Who are the leading providers, OEMs, and technology companies that are driving green telecom initiatives?     

•              What are some of the best practices being implemented today?     

•              What is the impact of green telecom on emerging markets versus developed markets?     

•              What is the business case for green telecom, and which components have the most impact on ROI?     

•              What is the market opportunity for green telecom in terms of Capex spending?     

•              How large is the opportunity for renewable energy in telecom networks?     

•              What is the potential for carbon emissions reduction through green telecom initiatives?     

I have included in this blog two charts from the Pike Research Report.     

So many new technologies, solutions and best practices are available today to help CSPs meet their challenges, it is also a great market opportunity for vendors and integrators:     

•             Network and data center platforms and designs , More efficient cooling technologies and design     

•              Access network efficiency improvements: DSLAMs, ONTs, BTSs, etc.     

•              Smart processors, controllers, and sensors     

•              Fuel cells and batteries     

•              Remote monitoring solutions (hardware and software)     

•              Solar PV for network power,  Wind energy for network power, Biomass for network power     

•              Improved ASICs,  Low Energy CPUs, IP Softswitches, Reduced Power RF Amplifiers     

•              Hardware, Software and Applications Virtualization     

•              Cloud Computing  etc…     

Mobile Network Green Capex, World Markets, 2009-2014

 

 So it should be a Win-Win for all, reduce cost and increase profitability and competitiveness for CSPs, additional revenue for innovative technology vendors and improved carbon emission for our planet.     

As so much of our life in the future will depend more and more on communications, 

     

We Need Smarter and Greener Telecom Networks!