Life cycle assessment of videoconferencing with call management servers relying on virtualization

Recently, data centres have been called out for their particularly high energy consumption, which already accounts for 1.5% of the total global electricity consumption and is among the world’s fastest growing energy consumptions. To reduce the data centres’ environmental impacts, technologies such as free cooling and sustainable power sources are used. Another newly developed strategy to improve the energy efficiency of data centres is virtualization, which makes it possible to install several operating systems, known as virtual machines (VMs), so that several tasks and users can share a single server. To evaluate the environmental advantages and burdens of this strategy, assessments tools are required. Several studies have already quantified the energetic and environmental benefits of virtualization but often only considered the use phase and CO2 improvement. This study uses life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of Internet use in videoconferencing (VC). Preliminary results show the advantages of virtualization in the manufacturing, use and endof-life phases. Indeed, when virtualization is implemented, one server can be allocated to several tasks. Therefore, the environmental burden of use and manufacturing will be allocated to the various tasks, decreasing the impact of each one.