A Call for Research on Storage Emissions
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.
Authors
- Fiodar Kazhamiaka (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0798-5151)
- Nathan Beckmann (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6301-714X)
- George Amvrosiadis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7328-1857)
- Kali Frost (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2493-5065)
- Rodrigo Fonseca (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9662-2661)
- Gregory R. Ganger (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3065-7316)
- Aaron Ogus (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6667-736X)
- Sara McAllister (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5253-7094)
- Daniel S. Berger (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3911-1512)
- Ricardo Bianchini (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5971-5084)
- Maneesh Sah (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5851-940X)
Institutions
- Microsoft (United States) (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- ACM SIGEnergy Energy Informatics Review
- Published
- 2024-12-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3727200.3727211
- Citations
- 11
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Data Storage Technologies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 3.84