A team at Cardiff University, under a project funded by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), is examining ways to reduce the amount of energy used by computers for data storage. It is studying a method of storing computer files that can reduce the amount of energy used by computers for storage by over 80 percent.
This follows concern over issues faced by UK universities and colleges due to carbon emissions from their use of Information and communications technology (ICT). One cause of the growth in these emissions is the demand for computing and in particular the ever-growing demand for data storage and data centres, it has been observed.
Dubbed Planet Filestore, the project has developed an approach to storing data on disks with different energy consumption depending on the frequency with which the data is accessed. Data which is not used very often is moved to a disk which uses less power, thus saving electricity and money while still allowing users near instant access.
When put into full production at Cardiff University, it is anticipated that this will save the university 87600KW.h (or approximately 51 tonnes of CO2) per year which, at current prices, would cost around £10,000 per annum. These savings are likely to increase significantly with escalating storage requirements and energy costs. Environmental savings are also likely to be made in terms of space occupied, procurement, shipping, disposal and hazardous waste reduction.
The project has intentionally used techniques and technologies that will easily transfer to a wide range of corporate systems across the world, including those in education, research, public bodies and commercial companies.
To help make this approach more widely available, JISC is funding Cardiff University Information Services to develop a web-based tool. Universities and colleges can use the tool to model the benefits of different scenarios of file storage in terms of environmental and economic savings.
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