One of the most important things to think about in terms of data storage and carbon emission is that the hardware manufacturing can sometimes be as much or more than the carbon emissions caused by the use of that hardware. In fact, the manufacturing of just 1TB of a traditional HDD results in 20kg of carbon; 1 1TB SSD results in 160kg! [footnote 1]. Over the lifetime of a particular hard drive, at least half of the carbon emissions are due to the manufacture, shipping and installation of the drive before it ever even gets powered on.
Storj recently launched Object Mount, a groundbreaking technology that enables users to interact with object storage directly from their Linux, Windows, and macOS devices. Object Mount transforms cloud or on-premise object storage into a high performance file system without requiring users to download files or migrate data.
This blog post explores specifically how Object Mount also plays a big role in helping to reduce the carbon emissions of media workflows.
#1 - Avoid purchasing a network attached storage appliance.
If you are able to avoid purchasing hardware to begin with, that is sometimes the biggest impact you can make. Object Mount is interesting in this aspect because it turns your archival storage platform into a “hot” working space for you to use—whether it’s live editing or development of your media assets.
Because Object Mount makes your archival storage platform show up as if it were a local drive on the computer, you don’t have to worry about buying other storage platforms. Object Mount ensures archived data remains easily accessible and fast.
#2 - Reduce media downloads.
When you're recovering media from an archive, assuming you have a large archive, one question that you might have is how you can process or reprocess that archival data. However, if you have a lot of archival data, sometimes that archival data is stored in a way where to make sense of it you need to first download it in its entirety. For example, an editor may need to download the entire video file before they can open it with their video editing software.
With Object Mount, because that data all shows up like a local drive, you can open it directly in the video editor without waiting for it to download in its entirety first. You can even pull out the key video frames that you're looking for without downloading the whole video file. This significantly reduces the amount of storage needed to operate, which reduces hard drive purchases, which reduces carbon emissions.
Object Mount also reduces the amount of egress from your archival storage platform by helping you make quick sense of the data you have by accessing only what you need. Reducing the amount of egress from your archival storage platform lowers the amount of energy use and overall carbon emissions of your archival platform.
#3 - Reduce the number of duplicates created.
Typically, media professionals will make a local copy of the data on their computer for their editing workflows. However, creating more copies of data in multiple locations means more storage and thus, as covered previously, more carbon emissions.
Object Mount allows users to work from the archive as a single source of truth. Therefore, every user who is working on some set of data can work directly out of the file in object storage. By eliminating redundant copies, you not only free up storage space but also reduce the energy consumption associated with maintaining and cooling servers. This, in turn, lowers the carbon footprint of data centers and cloud storage facilities.
Be a part of digital sustainability.
Object Mount, in addition to increasing sustainability initiatives, delivers a myriad of benefits to media professionals like real-time cloud editing, global collaboration, high-speed media ingest, smart archiving, and creative workflow simplification.
Distributed cloud technology from Storj is helping to put these sustainable strategies into action and lowers the carbon emissions of cloud services by up to 83%.
Watch this short educational video on lowering carbon emissions from the cloud.
Storj is a founding member of the Digital Sustainability Alliance, which promotes digital sustainability and shares strategic insights on sustainable technology practices and solutions. As a sustainable technology innovator or user of cloud technology, you can make a difference in building a greener tomorrow.
