Service Delivery Platform Energy
Efficiency Projects
Given the sheer scale, processing power and energy consumption of Akamai's global service delivery platform, it's no surprise that our engineers have always focused a great deal of time and effort on making the platform run as efficiently as possible. |
Maximize servers' efficiency and utilization
From a business perspective, it's clearly in our–and our customers'–best interest to maximize our servers' energy efficiency and utilization. This enables us to control costs and realize the greatest ROI from our hardware investments, while delivering the capacity and computing power our customers need. From an environmental standpoint, our server platform is the area where reducing waste and improving performance will pay the largest dividend in terms of reducing carbon emissions. The most substantial portion of our total carbon footprint is attributable to our global service delivery platform, so small gains in efficiency make a big difference in net environmental impact.
Power consumption initiatives
Initiatives are in place that will make a big difference to the power consumption of our service delivery platform. These initiatives, which have the potential to achieve significant efficiency improvements, include:
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upgrading older servers with more efficient components |
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improving maintenance procedures that keep servers in operation rather than unused and consuming power |
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implementing smaller disk drives and solid state drives that use less power |
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improving server management such as identifying and decommissioning or repurposing unused servers, and |
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implementing virtualization |
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Identifying and rewriting inefficient code to use less CPU and I/O, so that a single server can support more traffic, effectively increasing the capacity of our network without adding more servers. |
One of our goals is to enable real-time, remote power monitoring of our servers—so we can understand how and where power is being used and identify opportunities for further efficiency gains.
Third-party network providers and data centers
Another component of our platform’s carbon footprint is energy consumption in the third-party network providers and data centers that house Akamai's servers. Ancillary services provided by these third parties — such as cooling, UPS (uninterruptable power supply) and power conversion — can use as much power as the servers themselves, effectively doubling overall power consumption and carbon emissions.
There are new technologies being developed by server and infrastructure companies that can significantly reduce the amount cooling required per Watt of server power. Akamai is actively pursuing ways to leverage these energy saving technologies and encourage their adoption by third-party network providers and data centers. |
