Technology, Storage & Climate Change

There has been much in the press recently about the challenges humanity faces with Climate Change. For the last few weeks it has been headline news as heads from across the world were in Glasgow for the COP26 summit.?

The goal of COP26 was “to put the world on a path to aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow Earth's warming.”

Regardless of whether you think the summit was a success or not, we can all take positive steps towards solving the climate crisis.

Technology: Climate Change Friend or Foe

One of the biggest impacts on climate change is our technology and our rapid technological advancement. As we strive for smarter, quicker, and more scalable solutions, the solutions themselves can have a negative environmental impact.

But technology used in the right way with the right intentions can be a powerful force for good, as stated in a recent IBM Blog Post on Digital Technology and the Environment “Big data offers an unprecedented opportunity for scientific progress that can address our most pressing environmental concerns”[ Link ].

Big Data: Things can only get bigger

I have talked before about the speed at which we now create data. IBM says we create 2.5 quintillion bytes every day (roughly 2.5 million terabytes). This statistic gets mentioned by different media sources every year as if it was something new. This was originally quoted by IBM as far back as November 2013. With the exponential growth in data, you could conservatively quadruple 2.5 million terabytes.

That is a vast amount of data and we often consider data to have no physicality - after all it's just data a bunch of 0’s and 1’s. So you may be forgiven for thinking that data accumulation does not have any environmental impact. This is far from true.

Data lives in storage and regardless of the medium, storage methods all consume power in some way. The larger the amounts of data being help the more important it becomes that we use the most energy-efficient means of storage.

Flash: Saviour of the universe?

As far back as 2006 a report cited that a ‘Shift from hard drives to flash may have environmental benefits’. Fifteen years on we know that to be the case. Flash Storage is not only more energy efficient resulting in a reduction in electricity consumption, but has a longer life span and also a lower electronic waste (or e-waste) ?footprint. So Flash may not be the saviour of our universe, but moving to flash storage can certainly have a positive impact on the environment.

?Data, Data Everywhere?

Nearly ten years ago an IDC study estimated that all the data a business creates, only 0.5% was used for analysis. A further study in 2018 reported estimates of only ~20% of data being used for business analytics. This means 80% of business data stored had no value extracted from it. In my article ‘Data is the New Currency’ [ Link ] I talk about the importance of extracting the value from stored data - and turning your data into business impact.

?Given that data is currency many businesses are reluctant to get rid of their data, for fear that at some point, it will provide them with value. As previously discussed that data occupies expensive resources - and is consuming energy!

Tape Storage: the reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated

Many years ago when I first started in information technology most of the business's data was stored on magnetic tape. Loading and unloading tape was never without incident and was an acquired skill! Fortunately, time has moved on and disk storage capacities have grown larger and cheaper, meaning that many consider tape storage a thing of the past.

However tape storage should not be discounted as part of a business's storage solution. For a start modern tape solutions are now enclosed and are free from the challenges they had in the past.

As previously mentioned we have vast amounts of data that we rarely (or never) access.

A tiered storage solution, including tape storage, can reduce CO2 emissions by 87%.

Not only does this save costs, but also makes a big contribution to helping with the climate challenge.

?And finally . . .

Although COP26 is now over, our climate change challenges continue. ?

Technology can be part of the solution, but we all need to play our part by doing what we can, where we can.

Hopefully, we will all take up the challenge.

For more information: https://ibm.biz/Bdf9eD

From time to time, IBM partners with industry thought leaders to share their opinions and insights on current technology trends.

The opinions in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of IBM.

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