This brief talk was given as part of intiverence 2023. Some original slides have been redacted.

1. 1
12/6 Initiative

2. Problem Statement
2
Climate Change

3. Problem Statement
3
Climate Change

4. Problem Statement
4
Climate Change

5. About Me
 Solution Consultant in Agile-Lean focussed on process analysis, waste
identification, and continuous improvement.
 Green-Belt Six Sigma certified in a project reducing waste by ~96% in a
complex software development life cycle
 Inventor / developer of Fingerprint, a lights-out fully automated tool for post
release checks for Norton Suite of products on Norton ecommerce store.
 Inventor of the 8 Wastes Snake, a visual technique to identify and record
process waste under the 8 wastes of lean.
 Inventor of a device for harnessing energy from waves. Patent number:
07106450.5-1267
 17 years developing, documenting, testing and managing software
5
Why listen to this talk

6. Confidential – © intive 2022 6
Proposal: The 12/6 Initiative
V0.1 February 2022
Status: DRAFT

7. How Much Waste?
 Approximately 71% of all businesses have a website 3. Overall, there are now an
estimated 100,000,000 webservers in the world currently 4.
 If all of these were all running 24/7 it would take approximately 743 billion kWh
of electricity to power all these 5.
 Using the average amount of CO2 to produce a kilowatt-hour of 0.468 kg 6, it
suggests 0.35 billon tons of CO2 are used to run webservers each year.
 This compares well with the estimated annual output of CO2 resulting from the
production and running of digital media of 1.7 billion tons of CO2
7.
 To save the planet something has to change...
7
Time for some maths...

8. The Fallacy of Six-Nines Availability
 One of the attractions of the Internet was the ability for businesses to be "always on" -
with website operators offering guarantees that the business site would be accessible.
"Four-nines" meant a website would be available for 99.99% of the time; "six-nines" meant
99.9999% availability and so on.
 Always-on, 24/7 business seemed like a good idea,
in principle anyone anywhere could buy from a company.
 As a result, websites operating 24/7 are the current norm.
 However, 99.7% of businesses are small local businesses 1. Up to 46% of all Google
searches are for local businesses with 72% of people who perform a local search visiting a
store within a 5-mile / 8-kilometre radius 2.
 Most businesses will see daily and weekly cycles of visitors to their website. For the vast
majority, the website clicks correlate with the business hours. This means that the energy
used to run the website outside those hours is, to some degree, wasted.
8
Highly Available and Mostly Unused

9. The Fallacy of Six-Nines Availability
9
Highly Available and Mostly Unused
eukhost.com

10. Huge Anticipated Energy Usage
10
Datacentres: consuming the world?
eukhost.com

11. Saving the World, a Kilowatt-Hour at a time
The 12/6 Initiative seeks to get up to 10% of the worlds webservers to
be powered down outside historic peak website traffic hours.
 For many businesses that operate from 9 am to 5 pm Monday to Saturday, the webservers
would be available from 7 am to 7pm on these days and powered down otherwise.
 The move from 24/7 to 12/6 would save 57.2% in wasted energy and wasted electricity costs.
 If only 10% of servers round the world could achieve this reduction 19,900,000 tons of carbon
would not be produced.
 For perspective, that the equivalent weight of 100,000 mature blue whales saved, every year.
 In addition, by changing from "always-on" we can allow business owners and employees to
have some downtime as well as the machines that run websites and IT operations.
 Note: Not all companies will be willing or able to turn off servers for that amount of time. We
are recommending a data-lead approach so that servers are enabled and disabled just-in-
time based off historic low traffic hours.
11
From 24/7 to 12/6 Initiative

12. But wait, there's more...
 The move from 24/7 to 12/6 not only saves 57.2% in wasted energy and wasted
electricity costs - it also reduces the potential attack surface for hackers and
ransomware attacks by up to 57.2% also.
 Approximately 30,000 new websites are hacked daily with a 67% increase in the last 5
years 8.
 Ransomware is one of the fastest growing trends with an estimate that there is an
attack every 11 seconds 9.
 By powering down as many machines, especially servers as possible when they aren't
in use, the opportunity for attack is reduced and backup and restore policies can be
tested better.
12
Reducing the attack surface for hackers

13. But doesn’t autoscaling solve this?
13
No…

14. But doesn’t autoscaling solve this?
14
… but it might help
Top Cloud Challenges

15. Economics 101: Commons Dilemma
15
Someone (else), somewhere (else) should do something.

16. We (all) have to learn how to switch off to save
16
Using data to get to 12/6
 When do we really need a server to
be on?
 Do we have servers / data centres
in multiple geographic locations
(Follow the Sun model)?
 Is pre-production / production on
same servers?

17. ESG Requirements as a Supplier
In 2015, 196 parties adopted The Paris Agreement, aligning on trying to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
To achieve this goal, global GHG emissions should peak by 2020 and halve by 2030 to reach net zero by 2050 [10].
Many companies set a Carbon Neutral target for their own operations, including our clients.
Moreover, we – as their supplier – also impact their footprint and they expect us to reduce.
 How is Carbon Footprint measured?
 Scope 1: direct: company facilities and vehicles
 Scope 2: indirect: purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling for own use
 Scope 3: indirect: many factors e.g. purchased goods and services (suppliers)
With the 12/6 Initiative we reveal a tangible and realistic way to reduce GHG emissions in Scope 2 (when servers are
onsite) and in Scope 3 (when using external data centers). Additionally, the initiative also supports data centers
themselves in their way towards sustainability by driving efficiency in their operations [11].
17
Relevant and measurable impact for emissions reduction

18. How Automating Backup and Restore
 We worked with IT to see how possible it
was to turn off some of our servers in 2022.
 Feedback was that “it would be the
equivalent of running a full restore
procedure, every weekend, potentially
nightly”.
 However intive has experience in
 infrastructure automation (LITP, Stackstorm)
 business continuity consulting
 And…
18
Early internal investigations (2022)

19. 19
Thank You
12/6 Initiative

20. References
1. https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf
2. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/local-seo-stats
3. https://fitsmallbusiness.com/website-statistics/
4. https://www.racksolutions.com/news/data-center-trends/400-million-new-servers-might-be-needed-by-2020/
5. https://www.zdnet.com/article/toolkit-calculate-datacenter-server-power-usage/
6. https://www.seai.ie/publications/Energy-Related-Emissions-in-Ireland-2016-report.pdf
7. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think
8. https://patchstack.com/website-hacking-statistics/
9. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/industries-affected-ransomware-cybersecurity-cybercrime/
10. 1.5°C Business Playbook - Climate Champions (unfccc.int)
11. https://backendnews.net/schneider-electric-shares-5-step-plan-for-sustainable-data-center-operations/
20
The following references were used above. They were valid at time of writing.