SNIA makes case for green storage

While server and facility optimization are undoubtedly important parts of increasing data center energy efficiency, more efficient storage systems are also a key factor in the equation. One terabyte of stored data can easily sprawl over 10 terabytes of capacity, once overprovisioning, backup, etc. are accounted for.

Microsoft's Senior Standards Program Manager SW Worth speaks at the Next Generation Data Center conference in San Francisco

“Green motivations affect storage decisions that you make in your enterprise,” SW Worth, Senior Standards Program Manager at Microsoft, said. “It’s dollars out of your pocket. That can make it a compelling case to your upper management.”

Dell has recently conducted a study that determined that 41 percent of energy cost in its corporate data centers was used to run storage, Worth said. Similar published studies point to that number being generally between 10 and 40 percent for most companies.

Companies that own and operate data centers are not alone in their desire to reduce their energy use. Utilities will provide significant rebates to companies that deploy solutions that increase their energy efficiency and environmentally conscious regulators work with industry groups – such as SNIA, the Green Grid and the Uptime Institute – to draft legislation that will reward firms that seek out more efficient solutions and punish those that do not.

SNIA works to educate regulators, such as the EPA, on the importance of storage solutions in the overall efficiency equation. “The problem that the EPA has is they don’t necessarily know a lot about a specific area when they go into it,” Worth said.

Green storage solutions that SNIA recommends include thin provisioning, multi-use backup, virtual clones, deduplication, compression, using RAID 5 or RAID 6 disk arrays instead of the higher-level standards and simply smarter coupling of technology and the actual needs.

“Use the right RAID level,” Worth said. “Don’t double-track everything if you don’t have to. If you don’t have to mirror it, don’t mirror it. If you don’t need 1500 RPM disks, don’t buy it.”

Instead of getting the highest-grade equipment you can afford for all applications, get systems that are only as robust as necessary. “When storage is idling, the more expensive the storage array, the more fancy stuff it’s doing.” Thus, the longer some storage arrays are left idle, the less efficiently the data center is using energy.

SNIA is a non-profit organization made up of representatives from about 400 companies in the global storage market. Besides education, the association works on developing specifications and standards for storage solutions.

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