Green is possibly the most over-used word of 2007, but
the energy efficient message seems to have had little impact on UK
businesses. According to research by advisory organisation
theGreen
Technology Initiative, 70% of UK firms have no
plans to reduce theircarbon footprint.
It is easy to understand why green fatigue may have set in.
Business and the general public have been so utterly bombarded with
the green message that it has often appeared as hype, and it is
difficult to determine what real benefits a green approach will
bring, other than making one feel warm and fuzzy about being good
to the planet.
The IT sector has not been immune to this greenwash, with many
suppliers struggling to shoehorn an eco-friendly angle into their
marketing pitches. Storage suppliers in particular have been keen
to push the green message, but is it simply hype or is there some
good sense lurking behind the spin?
Green hype versus good sense
Storage and datacentre power usage is a major cost for business.
Gartner predicts that by the end of 2008, nearly 50% of datacentres
worldwide will struggle to get sufficient power and cooling to
support high-density equipment.
The analyst group also estimates that large corporations spend
between 4% and 8% of their IT budget on energy and that this will
increase by up to four times during the next five years - meaning
32% of IT budgets could be spent on energy by 2011.
In the light of such predictions, green policies begin to make
more sense, says Claus Egge, programme director for European
storage with analyst group IDC.
"If someone had only green intentions and nothing else, then I
think they would reap many efficiency benefits and the only way
they could get more would be if they turned off their IT systems
altogether," he says.
"Conscious and responsible use of resources is obviously better
than the opposite, and storage is prone to the green issue because
disc arrays are always on, utilisation is far from impressive,
capacity densities improve very quickly and customers buy and
replace quite rapidly."
In fact, storage is an area ripe for energy and space savings.
Lots of spinning disc is a power black hole and much of the storage
installed in datacentres is wasted. It either lies empty or
contains duplicate copies, and the operational price of keeping
underused and wastefully used storage systems running around the
clock is costly and unnecessary.
There is a lot of good sense in the green approach to storage,
says Hamish Macarthur, chief executive at analyst group Macarthur
Stroud International.
"Datacentres are highly concentrated centres of processors,
storage arrays, network directors, switches and so on. They all
need power and cooling and the higher density units and new
processor technologies demand more energy.
"And often the supply of power to each datacentre can be
limited, such as in the City of London. In some cases, 40% of the
datacentre footprint is taken up with power and cooling plant," he
says.
The green approach is not necessarily optional either. In many
cases businesses are forced to comply with regulations concerning
the disposal of equipment, such as the Restriction of Hazardous
Substances Directive and the
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive.
But, at the same time, by addressing power and cooling issues so
that existing capacity is used more efficiently, you can get more
work done with the same amount of kit, says Greg Schulz, founder
and senior analyst at analyst firm the StorageIO Group.
"By using storage that consumes the same or less power yet
provides more processing or performance for the same amount of
capacity and floor space, you end up doing more with what you have.
The result is that you can free up power or floor space from other
equipment and use that to support growth," he says.
Put simply, the benefits of a green approach are efficiency and
cost savings. The more efficient you are, the fewer resources you
consume. The less power needed to run a device the less heat it
will generate, so less cooling is required, and reduced cooling
requires less power.
"Power savings, less real estate and cooling are the obvious
benefits," says Clive Longbottom, service director for business
process analysis at analyst firm Quocirca.
"Less obvious benefits are better storage management
capabilities and faster search and retrieval. Others include
gaining a better understanding of the intellectual property that is
held within an organisation as a result of doing the preparatory
work for a rationalised, consolidated storage environment," he
says.
Key elements of green storage
So, what should be the key elements of a green storage
strategy?
Essentially the aim is to hold data with as great a utilisation
rate as possible on storage assets that provide the greatest energy
efficiency appropriate to their mission-criticality.
To begin with, you need to carry out a full survey of what data
your business is storing and follow this with a consolidation and
rationalisation project to determine data hierarchies and
possibilities for eliminating duplicate or unwanted data.
You should look at how data can be best matched to storage
resources, says Longbottom.
"Consolidation and rationalisation should look at how first-tier
storage assets could be upgraded to the latest systems to gain
efficiencies, but they should also look at how second-tier assets
can be created through the re-use of existing devices as
appropriate, with storage management minimising power requirements
through automated power switching of systems," he says.
As part of this process Longbottom recommends storage assets be
provided with an ageing profile, so that today's first-tier assets
become second-tier assets as time goes on, then become third-tier
or distributed assets further down the line.
The reason for doing this is that different storage media
account for differing amounts of power and cooling consumption.
Tape is the least costly, but it is generally only suitable for
archiving in a tiered storage architecture. Disc arrays are
essential for online storage and back-up and recovery, but they are
the most costly.
Benefits of disc-based equipment
Where possible, it is also worth looking at some of the more
energy-efficient disc-based equipment, such as Maid (Massive array
of idle discs) architectures, where only the discs that are being
used are spinning and drawing energy.
Such a strategy has to include how changes in the storage market
may accelerate the ageing profile, but it should also look at the
cost-effectiveness of the strategy when issues such as the WEEE
Directive are taken into account.
Finally, when a strategic approach aimed at lowering power
consumption is being drawn up, attention should also be given to
techniques that help minimise the duplication of data across
systems. These include master data management, where key data is
extracted from multiple databases and is kept in a single place,
and data de-duplication, which gets rid of duplicate records held
in multiple databases.
It seems then that when it comes to storage, green does indeed
make good sense. Not only can such an approach help reduce power
consumption and requirements on physical space, but the
rationalisation that should accompany green strategy will also
bring efficiencies in the way you keep data, by providing the
opportunity to discover what you hold, eliminate duplication and
store it on the most suitable assets.