The footprint expansion of cloud infrastructure has been continuous since the invention of the cloud in the early 2000’s. With data volumes growing exponentially and cloud costs continuing to rise, the carbon footprint reduction of your data center has become crucial for operational efficiency and sustainability. This short guide explores practical strategies to reduce your cloud infrastructure footprint, focusing on storage optimization.
Understanding the Challenge of Cloud Infrastructure Growth
Cloud infrastructure footprint extends beyond simple storage consumption. It encompasses the entire ecosystem of resources, including compute instances, databases, storage volumes, networking components, and their complex interactions. It’s not only a problem of companies on-prem. The most significant impact of data center carbon footprint in the public clouds still depends on the end user. Overprovisioning, usage of inefficient technologies, and lack of awareness are some of the problems contributing to the fast-growing cloud’s carbon footprint.
One thing that is often overlooked is storage. Storage, unlike compute, needs to be on at all times. Traditional approaches to storage provisioning usually lead to significant waste. For instance, when deploying databases or other data-intensive applications, it’s common practice to overprovision storage to ensure adequate capacity for future growth. This results in large amounts of unused storage capacity, unnecessarily driving up wastage and carbon emissions.
Environmental Impact of Cloud Data Center Footprint
According to the International Energy Agency, digital infrastructure’s environmental impact has reached staggering levels, with data centers consuming approximately 1% of global electricity use. To put this in perspective, a single petabyte of actively used storage in traditional cloud environments has roughly the same annual carbon footprint as 20 round-trip flights from New York to London. Overall, data centers contribute more to carbon emissions than the whole aviation industry.
Optimizing Compute Resources
Let’s first look at compute, which is the most often mentioned regarding data center footprint. Modern cloud optimization platforms like Cast AI have revolutionized compute resource management with the help of ML-based algorithms. Organizations can significantly reduce compute costs while maintaining performance by analyzing workload patterns and automatically adjusting instance types and sizes. Cast’s customers typically report 50-75% cost savings on their Kubernetes compute costs through automated instance optimization.
For AWS users, some tools enable organizations to leverage lower-cost spot instances effectively. Modern workload orchestrators can automatically handle spot instance interruptions, making them viable even for production workloads. There are also “second-hand” instance marketplaces, where users can “give back” their reserved instances they don’t need anymore. These solutions might have a considerable impact not only on carbon footprint reduction but also on savings.
Modern Approaches to Storage Optimization
Storage optimization has evolved significantly in recent years. Modern solutions like simplyblock have introduced innovative approaches to storage management that dramatically help reduce your cloud footprint while maintaining or even improving performance.
Thin Provisioning as a Rescue
One of the most effective strategies for reducing storage footprint is thin provisioning. Unlike traditional storage allocation, where you must pre-allocate the full volume size, thin provisioning allows you to create volumes of any size while only consuming the actual used space. This approach is compelling for database operations where storage requirements can be challenging to predict.
For example, a database service provider might need to provision 1TB volumes for each customer instance. With traditional provisioning, this would require allocating the full 1TB upfront, even if the customer initially only uses 100GB. Thin provisioning allows the creation of these 1TB volumes while only consuming the actual space used. This typically results in a 60-70% reduction in actual storage consumption and carbon footprint.
Sounds like a no-brainer? Well, cloud providers don’t allow you to use thin provisioning out of the box. The same applies to managed database services such as Amazon RDS or Aurora. The cloud providers use thin provisioning to benefit their own operations, but eventually, it still leads to wastage on the database level. Technologies like simplyblock come in handy for those looking to use thin provisioning in public cloud environments.
Intelligent Data Tiering
Not all data requires high-performance, expensive storage. Modern organizations are increasingly adopting various strategies to optimize storage costs while maintaining performance where it matters. This involves tiering data within a particular storage type (e.g., for object storage between S3 and Glacier) or, as in the case of simplyblock’s intelligent tiering, automatically moving data between different storage tiers and services based on access patterns and business requirements.
Take the example of an observability platform: recent metrics and logs require fast access and are kept in high-performance storage, while historical data can be automatically moved to more cost-effective object storage like Amazon S3. Simplyblock’s approach to tiering is particularly innovative, providing transparent tiering that’s entirely invisible for applications while delivering significant cost savings.
Maximizing Storage Efficiency Through Innovative Technologies
Modern storage solutions offer several powerful technologies for reducing data footprint, including:
- Compression: Reduces data size in-line before writing
- Deduplication: Eliminates redundant copies
- Copy-on-write: Creates space-efficient snapshots and clones
Compression and deduplication work together to minimize the actual storage space required. Copy-on-write technology enables the efficient creation of database copies for development and testing environments without duplicating data.
For instance, when development teams need database copies for testing, traditional approaches would require creating full copies of production data. With copy-on-write technology, these copies can be created instantly with minimal additional storage overhead, only consuming extra space when data is modified.
Integrating with Modern Infrastructure
Kubernetes has introduced new challenges and opportunities for storage optimization. When running databases and other stateful workloads on Kubernetes, one needs cloud-native storage solutions that can efficiently handle dynamic provisioning and scaling while maintaining performance and reliability.
Through Kubernetes integration via CSI drivers, modern storage solutions can provide automated provisioning, scaling, and optimization of storage resources. This integration enables organizations to maintain efficient storage utilization even in highly dynamic environments.
Quantifying Real-World Storage Impact
Let’s break down what storage consumption really means in environmental terms. For this example, we take 100TB of transactional databases like Postgres or MySQL on AWS using gp3 volumes as baseline storage.
Base Assumptions
- AWS gp3 volume running 24/7/365
- Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) for AWS data centers: 1.15
- Average data center carbon intensity: 0.35 kg CO2e per kWh
- Storage redundancy factor: 3x (EBS maintains 3 copies for durability)
- Average car emission at 4.6 metric tons CO2e annually
- Database high availability configuration (3x replication)
- Development/testing environments (2x copies)
Detailed Calculation
Storage needs:
- Primary database: 100TB
- High availability (HA) replication: 200TB
- Development/testing: 100TB × 2 = 200TB
- Total storage footprint: 500TB
Power Consumption per TB:
- Base power per TB = 0.024 kW
- Daily consumption = 0.024 kW × 24 hours = 0.576 kWh/day
- Annual consumption = 0.576 kWh × 365 = 210.24 kWh/year
- With PUE for AWS: 210.24 kWh × 1.15 = 241.78 kWh/year
- Total annual power consumption with redundancy is 241.78 kWh × 3 = 725.34 kWh/year
Carbon emissions: 725.34 kWh × 0.35 kg CO2e/kWh x 500 TB x 1.15 = 145.9 metric tons CO2e annually
The final calculation assumes additional overhead for networking and management of 15%.
Environmental Impact and Why We Need Carbon Footprint Reduction Strategies
This database setup generates approximately 146 metric tons of CO2e. That’s equivalent to annual emissions coming from 32 cars. The potential for CO2e (carbon footprint) reduction using thin provisioning, tiering, COW, multi-attach, and erasure coding on the storage level would come close to 90%, translating into taking 29 cars off the road. This example is just for a 100TB primary database, a fraction of what many enterprises store.
But that’s only the beginning of the story. According to research by Gartner, enterprise data is growing at 35-40% annually. At this rate, a company storing 100TB today will need over 750TB in just 5 years if growth continues unchecked. This is why we need to consider reducing the cloud’s carbon footprint today.
The Future of Cloud Carbon Footprint Reduction
As cloud infrastructure continues to evolve, the importance of efficient storage management will only grow. While data center operators have taken significant steps to reduce their environmental footprint by adopting green or renewable energy sources, a large portion of the energy used by data centers still comes from fossil fuel-generated electricity. The future of cloud optimization lies in intelligent, automated solutions that dynamically adapt to changing requirements while maintaining optimal resource utilization. Technologies such as AI-driven data placement and advanced compression algorithms will further enhance our ability to minimize storage footprints while maximizing performance.
Reducing your cloud data center footprint through storage optimization isn’t just about cost savings—it’s about environmental responsibility. Organizations can significantly lower their expenses and environmental impact by implementing modern storage optimization strategies and supporting them with efficient compute and network resources.
For more insights on cloud storage optimization and its environmental impact, visit our detailed cloud storage cost optimization guide. Every byte of storage saved contributes to a more sustainable future for cloud computing. Start your optimization journey today with simplyblock and be part of the solution for a more environmentally responsible digital infrastructure.