To fight global warming, carbon emissions must urgently be reduced. In this paper, we look at opportunities to do so by diminishing the operational energy usage of an important always-on element of the Internet: server systems. Our measurements from a server host indicate that there is probably not much to be gained by making a significant software change - but, depending on the system, a simple, easily overlooked configuration update may make a difference at no performance cost. This difference is small per server (in the order of an LED light bulb). Given the multitude of permanently operational servers in the world, it may however be significant at scale.

Deploying a new network architecture in the Internet requires changing some, but not necessarily all elements between communicating applications. One way to achieve gradual deployment is a proxy or gateway which "translates" between the new architecture and TCP/IP. We present such a proxy, called "Performance Enhancing Proxy for Deploying Network Architectures (PEP-DNA)", which allows TCP/IP applications to benefit from advanced features of a new network architecture without having to be redeveloped. Our proxy is a kernel-based Linux implementation which can be installed wherever a translation needs to occur between a new architecture and TCP/IP domains. We discuss the proxy operation in detail and evaluate its efficiency and performance in a local testbed, demonstrating that it achieves high throughput with low additional latency overhead. In our experiments, we use the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as examples, but our proxy is modular and flexible, and hence enables realistic gradual deployment of any new "clean-slate" approaches.