File hosting company Dropbox says that its data center use is matched by 100 percent renewable energy.
The company, which uses a mixture of colocation data centers and cloud storage, said that it also made significant energy efficiency improvements to help it reduce its overall footprint. Since 2013, the company has shifted from an all-AWS approach to a more holistic hybrid strategy it refers to as ‘Magic Pocket.’
The company claims that it has reduced its data center carbon footprint by 15 percent in the last year and a half.
This was achieved in part by quickly powering down decommissioned hosts, using a new automated ‘Pirlo’ system instead of waiting until an engineer can manually decommission it. This has saved an estimated five percent in power over each server’s lifespan, the company said.
Dropbox is in the middle of changing how it treats unallocated servers, with a new ‘HDD standby’ approach expected to yield approximately 50 percent power savings on storage hosts and 25 percent on HDFS hosts.
The company said that as of 2020 it is operating at 17 percent below the industry average power usage effectiveness of 1.58.
By 2030, the company has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality for scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 business travel emissions, and support organizations working for climate action.
Source: datacenterdynamics.com
Picture: Dropbox
