Paris — As global data production is now measured in zettabytes, Infotel presents its “Green Archiving” methodology through an address by its expert Morgan Attias: a concrete approach to reducing the carbon footprint of electronic archiving without compromising compliance, accessibility, or performance.
An unprecedented volume of data, an unavoidable environmental challenge
Annual data production growth has now reached a zettabyte scale (10²¹ bytes), an order of magnitude previously reserved for astronomy. In this context — and as CSR plans and environmental commitments continue to multiply — controlling the carbon impact of electronic archiving is becoming a strategic issue for organizations.
Beware of greenwashing
Morgan Attias warns against a common pitfall: carbon offsetting (tree planting, etc.) is not a viable long-term strategy. He encourages organizations to favor providers who are transparent about their actual footprint rather than relying on generic figures such as those from the French Base Empreinte database (0.5 to 24 g of CO2 per gigabyte stored in the cloud) — useful orders of magnitude, but rarely representative of an archiving and preservation context spanning 5, 10, or 15 years, or even permanent retention.
Blind spots too often overlooked
The study draws on research from Finland’s CSC and an analysis by the Council of Europe to highlight several commonly underestimated sources of impact:
- Physical archiving also generates a carbon footprint (climate control, transport, server-based indexing), which can sometimes exceed that of electronic archiving.
- Compression and encryption applied indiscriminately (for example, to files that are already compressed) can multiply the energy cost of processing by a factor of seven.
- Passive replication and overly frequent backup policies unnecessarily multiply storage volumes.
- Superfluous metadata: at the scale of hundreds of thousands of archives, every additional metadata field must be materialized and adds to the overall footprint.
By streamlining these practices — eliminating redundant copies and shifting to an appropriate warm or cold archiving strategy — the environmental impact of the same volume of data can be reduced by a factor of 10, or even 100.
Proof in practice: the Infotel Lab case study
To validate this methodology, Infotel’s teams carried out an internal project with a clear objective: build an archiving system with evidentiary value, compatible with a production environment, while minimizing energy consumption.
The test setup relied on several terabytes of data (archives ranging from 1 to 10 MB), targeting 100,000 archiving operations and 10,000 retrievals per hour. The results achieved with low-power hardware speak for themselves:
- 8 to 12 W under standard operation (peaks of 15–20 W) for low-power hardware
- versus 25 to 35 W under standard operation (peaks of 60–75 W) for a conventional server
A drastic reduction in consumption, achieved without any compromise on production performance.
Levers for action identified by Infotel
The expertise presented by Morgan Attias structures the Green Archiving approach around several pillars:
- Hardware: favor low-power servers and right-size resources according to actual needs
- Storage media: choose between disk, tape, and emerging technologies (DNA storage, ceramic storage) depending on use case
- Software: enable encryption, compression, and deduplication only when genuinely necessary
- Access management: combine hot, warm, and cold storage based on usage frequency
- Data lifecycle: define retention periods and deletion rules from the moment data is created
- Metadata: retain only the metadata that is genuinely useful for searching and exploiting archives
Infotel also recommends the General Eco-Design Reference Framework as a self-assessment tool for organizations looking to evaluate their own practices.
A guiding principle: reduce rather than offset
“There is no need whatsoever to sacrifice accessibility or drastically increase risk. By planning strategically, making informed decisions, and involving the various stakeholders who use the data, organizations can achieve an impressive reduction in environmental impact,” summarizes Morgan Attias.
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