One of the fastest
growing segments in the storage market recently seems to be the Green Storage
press release.
I'm getting a lot more of these than I used to.
The
typical
story runs something like this:-
exciting news! - GreenDiskCo
today launched a new
RAID system /
tape library /
Green Storage Software
Manager which uses 50% less electrical power.
- more -
It
goes on to quote an astonishing
market research report
from some tame lackey soothsayer which reveals that "electricity is a big
percentage part of the cost of running a datacenter!"
(That's
just in case you had the misconception that all those fans you hear whirring
around have clockwork innards which are wound up every night by the datacenter
minions. And just in case you've also ducked years of bombardment from
Sun's marketing rays about
its
CoolThreads.)
Strange but true...
Datacenters use a lot of electricity.
And a lot of what's sitting in those racks is actually storage. Bet you didn't
know that either.
Luckily the ecologically sensitive marketers at
GreenDiskCo are altruistically minded and don't want you to worry too much about
how to fix this new problem. They have a solution which links back (surprise,
surprise) to the first part of their press release.
- more -
GreenDiskCo's
press release concludes on the optimistic note that you can save tens of
thousands of dollars (that's worth a dolphin) - maybe even millions of dollars
(that's worth a whole whale) and if you're the type of big government user who
never disconnects old systems which you've stopped using because you don't know
which racks they are in you win the star prize - a cuddly family of polar
bears clinging onto their dwindling ice cube.
Punchline...
Here's the link to the order form. Click and fill in your PO number to save the
planet. Alleluja. Now you can go back to doing the boring everyday stuff.
I
get these kinds of stories from
PRs every day.
Sometimes every hour (it seems like).
If you're a regular reader of the
mouse site - you may be thinking -
I don't remember seeing them. And you'd be right - because I don't publish
stories which are untrue, deliberately misleading or complete nonsense - unless
the point of doing so is to tag on an "editor's
comment".
The disappointing thing is you aren't going to make
any savings at all (compared to buying new stuff from their main competitor -
GrayDiskCo) because when you look in detail at where the alleged electrical
power savings will be coming from - you notice that it's simply from using the
latest generation of disk or tape - and they all use the same stuff inside their
boxes anyway.
Unfortunately this muddies the waters for the genuine purveyors of
storage technologies which really can make a difference. Here's my list of "green"
storage priorities.
reliability -
You may be surprised I put storage reliability at the top. There's a lot of work
to do in this area - but I want you to think about how different storage
environments would be if disk drives, for example, never failed.
You
wouldn't need RAID for
local data protection. That would cut through the disk array population like
a dose of bird flu - taking out 20
to 50% of all disks. Another benefit of reliable disks is you wouldn't need to
keep changing the installed storage population as often as you do now. That
would halve the amount of disk storage you buy in a 10 year period - to just the
amount you need for new capacity - and not to manage attrition due to disk
failues and increasing errors. Halving the number of disk drives manufactured in
the world - by making them last longer - is green.
compression
- if done in real-time at wire speed - can recycle maybe 40% of capacity.
dedupe
- reduction of data footprint depends on what's in the archive - but double
digit percentage is realistic.
shift to
solid state drives -
I'm not talking here just about the lower power consumption of
flash SSDs
compared to hard drives
in notebook or blade server applications - but I'm also including the massively
high power consumption RAM
SSDs. The last one looks strange at first - but the effect of SSD
acceleration if used appropriately - is to speed up application performance -
which means lower power processors, or less processors, and possibly even a
halving of the total number of servers in the enterprise.
There are
many more tweaky little green storage technologies I could have mentioned - but
they are mostly evolutionary trends. It's the revolutionary stuff which you
haven't already been doing which will make the difference.
And the
good news? - Is that the green storage trend will make your applications run
faster - and save you money too. So the true cost - is the effort spent thinking
about it (which you have already started) and the time spent making plans to
evalauate these technologies. |
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Footnote:- there are other
types of so called "green" computing I could have mentioned above
instead of the GreenDiskCo example.
For example:- datacenters which
offset their CO2 contributions by paying
carbon
offsets, planting trees or using wind power.
In my view carbon
offsets are on the same morality plane as paying poor starving people in Africa
to diet instead of you. Instead of shifting the burden of the datacenter
footprint elsewhere - or fudging the issue - the sustainable answer is to do
more with less.
There are some great market opportunities here for
genuinely green products.
...Later:- September 2007 - I think I should add
EasyCo's Managed Flash Technology to the
true green technologies list above.
When the technology was announced
(in August 2007) I latched onto the speedup for
flash SSD arrays -
but didn't realise that it also has a beneficial effect on arrays of
hard disks too.
Although the effect is not as dramatic as for flash SSDs.
As well as
increasing hard disk thru-put significantly, MFT can also save drives and power
because it creates an environment where RAID-5 and RAID-10 have identical write
performance. Thus, in larger HDD systems, MFT reduces drive counts per unit of
usable space by approximately 30% | |
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