Given the rising energy costs and increasing data consumption, “energy consumption” and “carbon emissions” have become hot topics at this year’s World Mobile Communications Congress. Currently, the ICT industry accounts for approximately 7% of global electricity consumption. It is projected that by 2040, the ICT industry’s carbon emissions will rise to 14% of global emissions.

Disaster recovery is a solution that enterprises employ to ensure uninterrupted business operations during disasters. Traditionally, it involves setting up a target environment with the same configuration and quantity of instances as the source environment. Data is then continuously or periodically backed up from the source to the target environment to ensure the availability of the disaster recovery system. However, this approach leads to significant resource consumption and carbon emissions. The carbon emissions generated by the production environment also extend to the disaster recovery environment. To address this, our HyperBDR solution adopts hostless data synchronization technology. During data backup, there is no need to consume instance resources at a 1:1 ratio. Instead, the entire machine data is directly synchronized to object storage. Only when a disaster occurs, the object storage is converted into instances on demand, and the Boot in Cloud technology enables one-click restoration of business operations to a usable state. By leveraging the cloud to reduce overall disaster recovery costs, we have achieved a substantial reduction in the carbon emissions associated with enterprise disaster recovery. Through these measures, we are actively working towards carbon neutrality in cloud disaster recovery, mitigating resource consumption, and reducing the environmental impact of enterprises in this crucial aspect. Suppose a company has 500 hosts that need to be replicated from VMware to Alibaba Cloud for disaster recovery purposes, with a total data size of approximately 1.5TB. Under the traditional disaster recovery approach, it requires 450 MWh of electricity annually to power the 500 hosts, along with associated storage, networking, racks and physical infrastructure. In contrast, HyperBDR consumes only 53 MWh, representing an 88% reduction compared to the traditional method.

This means that HyperBDR reduces carbon emissions by 187 metric tons, which is equivalent to the carbon emissions generated by 40 cars in a year or the daily activities of 31 households over the course of a year. According to research firms, data centers have become the largest energy consumers globally, with their share of total electricity consumption projected to rise from 3% in 2017 to 4.5% in 2025. By 2030, it is estimated that the electricity consumption of data centers operated in China will exceed 400 billion kWh, accounting for 4% of the country’s total electricity consumption. To address the energy challenges posed by data centers, major cloud providers like Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud have committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2030.

As a cloud-native business-level disaster recovery solution, HyperBDR is committed to protecting the stability of enterprise cloud-based services while actively addressing carbon neutrality. Environmental issues are challenges faced by all of humanity, and in the face of the carbon neutrality topic, no single enterprise or individual can solve it alone. HyperBDR will continuously enhance its technology to help enterprises address carbon emissions in the cloud disaster recovery process, enabling them to embrace eco-friendly cloud adoption and environmentally conscious disaster recovery.