Storage is a hidden electricity vampire, sucking up far more energy than you might imagine.
InformationWeek recently estimated that storage uses as much as 40% of all of the power and cooling capacity in typical data centers. And Steve Visconti, President of Atrato,
recently wrote in an article in GreenerComputing that it costs a typical data center $75,000 a year to cool a high-end storage system supporting 1 Petabyte of data.
There are ways, though, to cut those power and cooling costs substantially.
An InformationWeek article does an excellent job laying out the costs and problems and suggestions. Based on that article, and other research of my own, here are five ways to green data center storage.
Eliminate duplicate data
The concept behind this one is simple: Eliminate duplicate data, and you'll cut your storage needs. Less storage means less power and cooling. And it means a slimmer budget as well. There are plenty of solutions for eliminating duplicate data. HP has some particularly interesting ones.
Check out this press release for details about several of them.
Eliminate or reduce tape-based backups
Backing up to tape takes an environmental toll related to acquiring and disposing of the tapes themselves. There are plenty of other ways to archive backups, such as direct-to-disk backups, sold by many major storage vendors.
Migrate rarely used data to idle disks or Tier 2 storage
Tier 2 storage or idle disks require far less cooling and power than does powerful, high-performance Tier 1 storage. Examine your overall data requirements carefully, and begin segmenting mission-critical data from less-important data and archival data. The power and cooling savings can be substantial, and you'll slash hardware and maintenance costs.
Use WAN acceleration to eliminate local storage
WAN accelerators
such as Riverbed Steelhead appliances can allow you to eliminate storage in branch offices, and store your data centrally. This will reduce or eliminate local storage, and greatly reduce power and cooling costs, as well as hardware and maintenance costs.
Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate
Many businesses still use server-attached storage instead of more centralized storage systems such as storage area networks (SANs). The environmental toll -- and the financial toll -- of maintaining massive amounts of server-attached storage can be tremendous. Consolidating storage not only helps the environment, but usually has a very high ROI and fast payback.
