Fujifilm Creates Sustainable Storage Initiative

Fujifilm Corporation announced the creation of the Sustainable Storage Initiative to highlight how tape technology can reduce electricity consumption and CO² emissions related to storage.

The initiative launches with a white paper, Accelerating Green Datacenter Progress with Sustainable Storage Strategies, published by IDC and sponsored by Fujifilm, providing an analysis of the energy savings and resulting environmental benefits of moving more data to tape.

“We’re proud to launch the Sustainable Storage Initiative to help spread awareness of today’s modern data tape technology as a solution to reducing CO2 emissions from storage operations while simultaneously reducing costs,” said Hironobu Taketomi, president, Fujifilm Recording Media USA., Inc. “Beginning with this study, Fujifilm’s global initiative will help companies around the world make smart decisions when assessing their storage options with sustainability objectives in mind.“

As the world faces a climate crisis, and the amount of stored data continues to grow unabated due to digital transformation and development of next gen technologies, data centers are under increased scrutiny for consuming large amounts of energy that result in increased CO² emissions. The goal of Sustainable storage Initiative is to spread awareness of the solutions that can reduce the environmental impact of data centers. 

The IDC whitepaper summarizes findings on how to enhance the sustainability of storage.

(Source: IDC Global StorageSphere, 2021)

Reporting from several major data centers found that energy consumption increased by 31% from 2017 to 2020, and the amount of data stored in data centers is expected to grow by 27% each year through 2025 (see figure above).

Relying on renewable energy alone is not enough to keep up with rapid growth in data center power consumption. Water, wind and solar power also have their own associated impacts on the environment (i.e., disposing of wind turbines and solar panels). 

(Source: IDC 2021)

To negate this growing issue and protect the environment from further damage, IDC estimates that strategically migrating more storage to tape can reduce CO2 emissions by 43.7%, or 664 million tons, by 2030 (see figure above).

Tape storage offers additional security benefits such as immutability, encryption features and offline “air gap” protection vs. cyber criminals.

Tape is the most cost-effective storage media on a cost per gigabyte basis, requires minimal power to operate and is reliable for storing data for periods exceeding 30 years with good bit error rate.