I don’t think I have ever seen the words ‘ecological’ and ‘Domain Name System’ used in the same sentence. That could well be because the two are not generally perceived to share much in common. At least I didn’t think so.

But after a friend of mine from the UK went to see An Inconvenient Truth featuring Al Gore and sent out a worried message to everyone in his address book, and as another friend from the US abandoned his huge SUV and started driving around in a rather ecological Toyota Prius almost in parallel, I couldn’t help but to start thinking about DNS from the ecological point of view:

What could we do to enable the networking community to run their DNS implementations on a smaller ecological footprint?

The first thing that came to mind was the energy consumption of servers. As we all know, servers generate quite a lot of heat and to cool them down, one oftentimes has to use air conditioning. That’s actually not very surprising, as the world uses more energy to cool places and things down than they do to warm them up. But as I’m sure there are organizations much better equipped to address these issues (we’re neither hardware component manufacturer nor air-conditioning vendor – let alone a utility company) this thought ended up being a bit of a dead-end.

And then it hit me: software appliances are more ecological than hardware-based appliances because they can be downloaded from the Internet and installed locally, whereas hardware-based appliances get shipped around a lot – usually by air. And so, adopting the software appliance approach actually does make an ecological difference as there are less airplanes involved in the supply chain.

Of course, one does need a general purpose server on which the software appliance is installed. But as the supply chain for general purpose servers is significantly shorter and more efficient than it is for hardware-based appliances, general purpose servers are more environmentally friendly. So from the ecological point of view, it would be best to either continue running the existing, software-based DNS servers, or alternatively switch to a DNS software appliance. Hardware-based DNS appliances are not in par with the two in terms of ecological footprint because of their long supply chains.

When we started thinking about developing a DNS software appliance – Nixu SNS – I have to admit that we were not thinking about energy-efficient supply chain. No ma’m, we were thinking about a cost-efficient supply chain instead. But it’s actually quite rewarding to notice that sometimes, cost-efficient and ecological do shake hands.