Energy consumption of the Internet will be one of the main challenges that technology will have to face in the future. Unfortunately, current and planned evolutions of the Internet, although they plan for a variety of improvements like increased capacity, easier manageability, and stronger security & privacy, do not address energy consumption issues.
As a National Research and Education Network (NREN) and as in our Mission Statement, we have the vision of developing Education and Research in Greece along with the equal participation of our organizations in the Pan European society of knowledge with the provision of modern, advanced and reliable Internet services to all the Educational and Research Institutions.
By taking into account the above-mentioned considerations and by recognizing that our operations have an effect on the local, regional and global environment, we are committed to include innovative green technologies in our networking and computing infrastructure and reduce our yearly greenhouse gas emissions footprint. In order to achieve that, environmental regulation, laws and codes of practice will be highly regarded when assessing standards of environmental performance.
Towards this direction, our environmental policy will be based on the following axes:
- upgrade our networking and computational infrastructure with energy efficient equipment,
- deploy energy consumption monitoring infrastructure for the real time monitoring of energy consumption in our Points of Presence (PoPs) and Data Centers,
- participate in research activities for the design of energy aware mechanisms for the operation and control of the network,
- improve energy efficiency in our data centers (low Power Usage Effectiveness – PUE values) through the application of innovative energy aware techniques,
- increase environmental awareness of the Greek research and academic community through the dissemination of “green” best practices,
- reduce travel necessarily incurred as part of work by using videoconferencing tools,
- minimize environmental pollution through the reduction, reuse or recycling of materials as much as possible.
To this end, we will measure and periodically report on our progress in realizing these commitments.
