Environmental Sustainability

Identifying the impact policy has on energy consumption

This project examined the impact on the energy consumption of the service that our service management policies and aspirations have. As part of the project we reviewed our Rapid Assessment Model (from the DPC) service aims and aspirations, and assessed the risks to the collection using DiAGRAM tool (from The National archives). We monitored the power consumption of the servers that we use to use routinely manage our content and estimated our proportion of the usage of the Centre for Environmental Data Analytics service. The key findings were:

1. It was possible to see the power consumption effects of the longer running routine jobs
2. Unexpected events, from benign ones through to malicious ones, will have an impact on the service's energy consumption so that important, but at first glance unrelated activities such as ensuring your service acts on any IT security vulnerabilities also has a contribution to make to your environmental footprint.
3. The timing of routine jobs can make an impact on energy costs/type of energy. So that running them outside of standard working hours may well mean that the electricity costs are reduced.
4. We demonstrated it was more efficient (as expected) to use a shared computing platform that run our own equipment. We will review our risk appetite regarding the infrastructure.
5. We will investigate and implement guidance available on building energy efficient web applications.
6. We will build the concept of an energy consumption dashboard into the Admin function of our system.

1. Preservation content: energy consumption vs risk to content Preservation activities need energy to run, but reduce risk to the content. In this case, minimising risk to the collection outweighs the energy consumption.
2. Preservation content: energy consumption vs content reputation For some content we are the sole repository, therefore it is important that content is not lost.
3. Infrastructure risk appetite: energy consumption vs service reliability reputation The current architecture is not as energy efficient as other possible one, but we have more control over it.
4. Infrastructure kit specifications: energy consumption vs responsiveness The current approach of buying physical kit at a specification that will last years. Is this better as it is replaced less frequently, and is more powerful than originally needed or is it consuming more energy to run it?
5. Storage medium: energy consumption vs user experience Instantly accessible storage media needs energy to run, tape doesn't but is not instantly accessible.
6. Application development: energy consumption vs resource required for adaptions There is a lot of activity in the green computing space, and we would like to implement this but are aware of the staff time needed to make changes.

As a service designed to support the Energy research community and the UKERC community in particular, our environmental footprint is a key factor in decisions going forward and this project has helped to set a framework for this. Final report available from ePubs.

This project was funded through the STFC's Environmental Sustainability Concept Fund, which was aimed at STFC staff.