Energy efficient data centres – saving power and saving money through integrated disk and tape-based storage

Despite the current economic climate, businesses and public sector institutions in the UK still face growing pressure from customers, the government, industry bodies and those further down the supply chain to prove that they are taking steps to reduce their impact on the environment. 2009 is seeing businesses across the board express an interest in both the embodied and operational carbon footprints of the goods and services they purchase, as a matter of commercial performance.

Taking the time to really understand the green issue both from a legislative, business driver and environmental standpoint, will stand any business or organisation in good stead. Customers are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to understanding the green debate. Terms like ‘green washing’ are now applied to products and services where marketing them as green has clearly taken precedence over their genuine green credentials.  By understanding the issues, businesses can avoid being caught out.

In an age when businesses, government organisations and individuals alike are struggling to reduce or neutralise carbon footprints, allowing data centres to continue to consume large and increasing quantities of power unchecked doesn’t meet with widespread approval. For this reason, directors are beginning to feel commercial pressure to make their organisations more power efficient.

Part of the power consumption issue in data centres is storage efficiency. The volume of data most businesses need to store is growing at a phenomenal rate, as is the length of time businesses are keeping data for. Businesses are backing-up, and in many cases duplicating, vast quantities of data both on and off-site to avert potential data disasters. Compliance and legislation issues also require businesses to retain more data for longer. Such trends look set to continue and data volumes are only going to increase.

The IT industry as a whole is urgently looking for ways to reduce power consumption. Given the state of power availability, improving efficiency is essential in order to make further data centre expansion economically and environmentally defensible, and board-level executives will certainly be realising this as the green IT debate continues.

For those that already have restricted power provisioning in place, there is a real challenge to find the most power efficient solutions.  There are examples where data centre floor space cannot physically be utilised because the existing equipment has used up the power quota.

In recent years, data growth has been facilitated by the falling cost of storage. The growing capacity and falling cost of disk-based storage with ease of implementation has lead to racks of disk in lieu of traditional tape.  Tape based storage of backup data is the obvious choice to meet the environmental requirements – tape media is passive, has a higher density than disk and therefore does not require the same levels of provisioning in power, floor space or cooling.  Mid range tape such as LTO can stream data faster than secondary disk when data paths are combined.  The management of media has come a long way since the early robotic libraries, with intelligent background diagnostics, self healing policies and meaningful reporting.  A lot of the management time in looking after tape has now been simplified and by integrating disk with tape, further savings can be made.  Disk provides an interface to tape that smoothes backup management and makes efficient use of backup time windows.  Administrators can choose by policy which content they want retained on disk for day to day restore operations.

Other technologies are now prevalent to help with the provisioning burden of pure disk – Deduplication for instance provides significant saving in the storage of backup data by keeping just the non-redundant parts of the entire data set. This technology also allows for remote site backup from a central location, reducing administration and equipment costs.

Customer requirements are invariably different and it is important to optimise the ratio of disk and tape used – Quantum for example are uniquely positioned to provide combinations of just tape, de-dup disk and tape or just de-dup disk.

At a time when data centres are reaching the limits of available power, with estimates suggesting as much as 60 per cent of power used in a data centre is wasted on cooling, integrated solutions that require far less power and cooling whilst retaining manageability must come as a welcome relief.

Contact Trustco for futher information.