Dropbox announced its data center storage servers are powered by 100% renewable electricity, meeting part of its 2030 target nine years ahead of schedule. 

The storage service’s overall goal was to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, Latane Garetson, head of data center physical infrastructure, told SDxCentral in an interview. 

Dropbox initially focused on increasing the efficiency of its hardware to lower the amount of energy needed to power its data centers, and then turned to carbon offsetting and renewable energy credits.

“Most [companies] can leave a footprint and then offset it by investments. Our strategy was to reduce the actual emissions first, and then do the offsetting or [buy] the renewable energy credits when we couldn't do any more offsetting,” Garetson said. 

Dropbox also, according to Garetson, intends to slash its power consumption in half for certain servers by introducing a new server state called HDD Standby. In this state, data center CPUs idle at a lower speed than the typical CPU idle speed, resulting in higher energy efficiency. 

With a lower CPU idle speed, “it will take a little bit longer to get to what you need, but that doesn't impact our customers or our users at all,” Garetson explained. 

He compared the energy savings of HDD Standby to the gasoline that can be saved by putting a car in park while not moving rather than leaving it in drive. “You're not wasting as much gas as it would be idling away,” he said. The same principle applies to CPU idle speed.

Another large source of data center energy consumption comes from cooling thousands of servers. While data centers often cool the entire room to prevent overheating, Dropbox implements cooling containment designs before a server is powered on to prevent leakage. 

“We're trying to keep the cooling inside the containment pod where it's just cooling the servers but not the outside room,” Garetson explained. “I haven't seen that in very many [data center] environments.”

Dropbox also moved to a monthly capacity planning model for its data centers. The frequency of this model helps Dropbox audit its storage services on a monthly basis to ensure servers aren’t running and using power if nothing is being stored on them, Garetson said.

“This enables us to build a more reliable model from more data points, which increases accountability and allows for quicker, more nimble pivots in capacity planning,” Garetson wrote in a blog post. 

Dropbox said it has reduced its data center footprint by 15% in the last eighteen months, and Garetson remains optimistic about the company’s future sustainability progress. “We jumped the gun on our initiative, and we're super proud of how much ahead of our goals we are,” Garetson said. “We're gonna keep maintaining that for the rest of eternity.”