Green storage for data management

Article based on content written by Juergen Arnold from SNIA Europe for data management news (www.datamanagementnews.com)

Sometimes a topic or idea is discussed so much that it almost becomes a campaign; we stop questioning it and instead end up believing it.

From health (bottled water is purer than tap water) to of course IT (too many instances to list), most subjects or items can become the hottest item on today's agenda.

The latest example of such a phenomenon within the Information Technology and data management world is the environmental agenda. 'Green IT' is now becoming a business-level concern, with the following areas in need of discussion and action:

- the limits imposed on additional hardware in data centres ;

- ongoing costs that organisations must sustain for powering and cooling data centres;

- new regulatory directives on the implementation of the environmental agenda, driven by the EU or by individual countries.

The rise of the green IT discussion from IT department to board-level is one of the factors that has made this topic become so widespread throughout the industry in such a short amount of tume. Never before had such a technical matter become the subject of the senior management spotlight in such a short space of time. Undoubtedly this is partly due to the fact that ‘being green' is seen as having a positive effect on a company's brand and hence ensuring that individual IT companies or data centres are reducing the impact they may be having on the environment is now close to the heart of many Vice Presidentss and CEOs.

But are data centre managers communicating effectively in order to devise a successful green strategy for their organisation? Do they have all the facts necessary to discuss this topic with the rest of the organisation and to eventually neutralise their CO2 emissions? Do IT managers know how much power their infrastructures use? How much they use for cooling? How much this costs? How much additional equipment their data centre can host to accommodate business growth? Have they ever worked out their data centre efficiency metrics?

And of course the green debate is not just about power and cooling. In 2005 and 2006, vendors selling in the EU all had to implement the RoHs directive (Removal of Hazardous Substances) in their products and nowadays many European countries have processes in place to recycle electronic waste.

So what measures are at the disposal of IT managers to address these issues?

The media has extensively covered the development of this debate and plenty of information can be easily found on the Internet. However, in order to provide organisations with vendor-independent information, SNIA recently formed the SNIA Green Storage Task Force and a Green Storage Technical Working Group. As a result, the association delivers tutorials to help IT professionals better understand this topic. The storage industry has introduced new technologies and architectures to help data centres save energy and cost. A leading examples is the 2.5 inch Serial Attached SCSI or SAS drive technologies, which dramatically reduce power and cooling requirements. Data de-duplication, virtualisation and storage consolidation also reduce the amount of physical storage required, thus cutting down on hardware and its carbon footprint and ultimately lowering an organisation's OPEX and CAPEX.

Beyond SNIA's activities, the "Green Grid" initiative www.thegreengrid.com is a great source of educational information at data centre level.

Becoming green is a rewarding experience which enables organisations to reduce both costs and environmental damage. The IT industry has already made great progress in identifying the initial steps that can make datacentres become more efficient with regard to their power and cooling consumption. As time goes on new metrics will be defined so that organisations can accurately discover their carbon footprint size and origin and take corrective actions. In the meantime, the deployment of technologies such as data deduplication, Thin Provisioning, and tape-based archiving will allow data centres to become more environmentally friendly.