The carbon cost of storing data

Everyone in ESB that has a network account login also has a 'personal' file storage area, referred to as a P: drive which is located on data storage equipment in data centres. Outlook uses your P drive, as do other office applications and your My Documents folder. Many have access to shared folders. The financial cost of storing data is charged out to your business unit based on the volume of data stored.

So where's the carbon cost in all of this? Data storage equipment uses a lot of energy and ESB's is in data centres. Each Terabyte of data stored is responsible for almost three tonnes of CO2 emissions annually from energy consumption alone.

We can drive this down by doing the following:
• Clean out your Outlook mailbox, especially attached files.
• Compress files in your MyDocuments and shared folders if you're not actively using them.
• Don't keep duplicates of files in different folders.
• Don't send files attached to emails if you can avoid it ; tell the person you're emailing where they can find the file.
• Don't keep your personal data on P drives or shared folders

Check out the document named Sustainable ICT – Managing Your Data, in the Latest News section of the Sustainability Intranet.