Ten tips for green storage

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It may not be the top green topic on many minds this Earth Day, but being clever about storage can help cut power consumption and cooling demands – you just need to cut through the hype first.

So say a report by Forrester Research, which noted that key green storage areas such as power consumption, cooling and manufacturing processes had been placed on the backburner because of more pressing economic demands.

“Given that power costs are a drop in the bucket compared with the cost to buy and run storage systems, most organisations don’t see power consumption as a material concern,” analyst Andrew Reichman wrote in the report.

“Legislation or events that increase the cost of power or penalise firms for data centre power consumption may make this more of a priority, but most organisations have bigger fish to fry for now.”

The report noted that servers have seen more attention – especially when it comes to virtualisation – than storage. Despite both types of hardware requiring about the same amount of power in an average data centre, servers do create more heat, meaning any consolidation in the server area will lead to better cooling savings, Reichman noted.

What's more, the cost to power storage is so much lower than the cost to buy it, he explained. By a rough calculation, 100 terabytes of storage would cost $13,600 to power in the US for a year, but buying that much hardware could cost as much as $1,400,000.

On top of that, IT departments don’t pay most power bills, so such costs are even easier to ignore – if they’re even accurately measured at all. “Without a direct budgetary impact to the storage organisation, it’s hard to make power efficiency a big part of product selection and architecture design,” he said.

While it may not be a top priority for businesses, cutting power use to storage can save cash and CO2 emissions. Reichman offered 10 tips to make storage a bit greener.

Hit delete more – Reichman called the delete button “one of the greenest tools” in the storage world. Cutting back on the amount of data stored – and moving more into archived systems – will save space on top-level storage tiers.

Solid state drives – SSDs do use less power than traditional drives, but they cost more to buy, too. That said, Reichman explained that using SSDs strategically could help cut the performance needed from other drives, helping increase potential density.

Look to dense drivers – Reichman noted that SATA and FATA drives may seem less cutting-edge than some shiny new tech, but use less power. “High-density drives cost about the same as high-performance drives but pack up to two TB into each platter, while high-performance 15,000-RPM drives generally hold only 146 to 300 GB. So you get nearly 10 times the capacity (or more) at the same cost with lower power consumption.”

Thin provisioning – This virtualisation-based tool cuts the total amount of space dedicated to stored data, meaning less disks are needed and automatically cutting hardware use.

Deduplication – Another virtualisation technology, depulication removes redundant copies, meaning less disk space is required – and less disks are spinning.

Taking snapshots – Backups are important, but snapshots mark only the changes since the last backup, instead of recording everything. This cuts the amount of space needed to hold such vital copies.

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