Object Storage footprint calculation

This page includes the specificities of the environmental footprint calculation for Object Storage.

Calculation aspects

The total estimated impact of Object Storage volumes is calculated by integrating the:

• Dedicated manufacturing impact - Related to the physical servers hosting the storage volumes.
• Related manufacturing impact - The impact of the tools used to manage the Object Storage offers: control plane, monitoring, internal load balancers, and others.
• Energy usage impact - The average electricity consumption of storage servers and their energy efficiency and of the tools used to manage the Object Storage offers.

Ratio per storage volume

To allocate the impact of an Object Storage volume, we apply the unit resulting from the RCP allocation rule, the s3_ratio, to all calculation steps:

s3_ratio = VOLsto/VolstoPool

• VOLsto - represents the reserved volume per user. In Object Storage, your data is replicated 1.5 times on multiple nodes to guarantee availability, so the VOLsto is applied with factor of 1.5 to account for replication.
• VolstoPool - represents the total storage volume reserved for Object Storage. For this product, only 80% of the total storage capacity of the machines is available. The remaining 20% is reserved for performance reasons.

In the example below we consider a VOLsto of 150 GB and a VolstoPool of 800 GB.

s3_ratio = 150/800 = 0.19

Manufacturing impact

The calculation of the manufacturing impact of Object Storage volumes is based on:

• The manufacturing impact of servers that host user storage
• The manufacturing impact of servers used by the Scaleway Object Storage team to manage the service - on both the Control and Data planes
• The manufacturing and electricity consumption impact of the remaining product lifecycle aspects: datacenters and technical environment, network and cross-IT equipment & stocks.

The calculation is the same one used for measuring the impact of manufacturing for Bare Metal servers, which we consider the basis footprint calculation, but for Object Storage we also apply the s3_ratio to break the impact down to only the allocated volumes.

Calculation example

For the example below, we consider a single server with a lifespan of 6 years (52 560 hours) and power of 110w. We measure the impact of 100 hours and consider through Boavizta estimates that the impact of the manufacturing of this server is 850 kgCo2e. Also considering a s3_ratio of 0.19, we make the following calculation:

VolumeManufacturingImpact = (100 / 52560) * 850 * 0.19 = 0.3 kgCO2e

In the example, the dedicated manufacturing impact of a 150 GB usage for 100 hours is 0.3 kgCo2e.

Usage impact

The calculation of the usage impact of Object Storage volumes is based on:

• Impact of electricity consumption of servers that host user storage
• Impact of electricity consumption of infrastructure and service management servers by the Scaleway Object Storage team to run the Object Storage service. In this case we consider both the Control and Data planes.
• The electricity consumption impact of the remaining product lifecycle aspects: datacenters and technical environment, network and cross-IT equipment & stocks.

Since Object Storage is a regional product, we consider the energy mix of the country and the average PUE of data centers in the region to calculate the impact of a kwh.

In the example below, the energy mix is O,065kgCo2e/kwh and the PUE is 1.16. Considering a server electrical consumption of 600wh, 100 hours of usage, and a s3_ratio of 0.19, the total usage impact comes down to:

UsageImpact = 0.600 * 100 * 1.16 * 0.065v* 0.19 = 0.74 kgCo2e

In the example, the usage impact of a 100 GB usage for 100 hours is 0.74 kgCo2e.