Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
While there's plenty of talk about data center efficiency and the rising cost of energy for data storage equipment power and cooling, saving power takes a back seat to other priorities at many IT shops. That can be partly blamed on the complex path to storage efficiency and power savings. Many users are now comparing the power usage data of different vendors' equipment, and there are a variety of technologies to chip away at the energy consumption problem, all with varying results for different aspects of the storage lifecycle. Emerging and receding technologies are also constantly changing the power consumption landscape, and some techniques that carried big promise have faced the critical light of real-world use. In spite of these obstacles, the energy use problem must still be addressed. Fortunately, help is on the horizon from the EPA, sophisticated data reduction and utilization tools, and more efficient storage tiers. Read on for our full examination of storage equipment power efficiency.
Energy
Star storage, storage efficiency technologies ease power burden of data storage
equipment
IT organizations wanting to make intelligent choices about storage equipment purchases based on
their power consumption have long been hampered by the effort required to compile and analyze
energy use data from different vendors. That chore is due to get easier within a year when the EPA
releases its Energy Star-qualified list of data storage equipment, which will make it as easy to
compare the power consumption of storage arrays as it is to compare refrigerators. The agency is
even considering reporting thermal information about hardware to help optimize heating and cooling
of data centers. In the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities to conserve power, reduce
cooling needs and save money with existing systems using a combination of storage efficiency
technologies such as data deduplication, compression, snapshots, thin provisioning, virtualization,
energy-efficient disks, tiered storage and drive spin-down. Read about the EPA's plans for Energy
Star storage and learn strategies for saving money with storage efficiency technologies.
Data
reduction techniques for better storage efficiency
The first step in reducing a company's storage footprint should be deletion of files, according to
analysts. While automated data retention policies help with that chore, some companies leave the
deletion to users. In that case, you can simply tell them to delete unneeded data, and when they
don't comply, up the ante by making the archiving process difficult. Only then should you bring in
the big data
reduction and efficiency guns: dedupe, compression, snapshots and thin provisioning. Find out
how one company is leaning on users to cut down on capacity use, as well as a quick explanation of
what the four types of efficiency tools do.
SAS
and SATA, solid-state storage lower data center power consumption
The classic tiered storage structure, with Fibre Channel disk at the top followed by SAS
and SATA disk, is shifting toward greater power efficiency. Power-hungry Fibre Channel is
nearing the end of the road as a disk interface, and power-efficient solid-state storage is
emerging as a cost-effective, tier 0 medium in certain uses. What that means for storage managers
is that, in the not-too-distant future, it will become easier to optimize data storage equipment
for power efficiency. Read about how the tiered model will change and how automated storage tiering
technologies are set to take advantage of the new structure.
Disk
spin-down: Power savings with a catch
It is definitely possible to cut disk power usage using disk
spin-down, or MAID, technology. But MAID carries trade-offs in terms of disk spin-up time when
data is accessed, as well as potential time-outs when copying big files. In some cases, the
trade-offs are too great. Read about one IT organization that went down the MAID route and is
turning back.
Reduce
storage power consumption via higher IOPS and capacity per watt
While it may seem like all your storage efficiency bases are covered by data reduction, thin
provisioning, snapshots and disk spin-down, they're not. Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at
StorageIO Group and author of The Green and Virtual Data Center, also advises IT shops to
target performance-intensive environments with faster disk drives and data-intensive environments
with a higher capacity per watt. Listen to this podcast interview with Schulz to find out what that
strategy would mean to an IT shop in terms of reducing storage
power consumption.
This was first published in July 2010
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