Green IT Beyond Virtualization: Storage Matters

REDUCE, REUSE ...
A number of best practices and technologies can help reduce your overall data storage requirements and associated utility costs. For example, compression has been around for a while and was widely used when disk capacities were more limited. As larger and larger drives became available, interest in compression declined. While it's true that compression won't help much with some types of data, mainly media files--which already are compressed--it may be time to reconsider the technology for basic files.

Data deduplication and single instancing of data, can significantly reduce storage requirements--we've seen 20-to-1 or higher improvements. Thin-provisioning technology allows more efficient utilization of storage by eliminating the need to overallocate at initial provisioning. With thin provisioning, you can take out some of the guesswork by allocating only the space you immediately require and allowing the storage platform's thin provisioning capability to increase allocated space as needed, up to a preset limit.

Snapshot technology provides the ability to work with a snapshot in time of a data source while using a fraction of the storage typically required for a full copy of the original data. For example, your database administrator can work with a copy of a SQL database for testing or to perform backups.

Wide Area File Services, WAN optimization and acceleration, and protocol acceleration, while not storage technologies per se, can be a significant part of your storage architecture. One client was able to use these systems to build a centralized library of engineering drawings and eliminate local (and redundant) copies of data in 12 locations. CIFS acceleration to remote sites improved open and save operation times by about twentyfold.

You've probably heard of many of these technologies before; however, competition and hardware advances mean they're now far more affordable. Depending on the amount and type of data you have and the layout and capabilities of your WAN, they can improve your storage architecture, reduce power and cooling requirements, and lower ongoing utility costs.

WANT SOMETHING SEXIER?
Where ultimate performance is required, emerging solid-state drives can provide superior performance while significantly reducing power requirements because they run much cooler.

And performance is eye-popping: IBM recently announced that its Project Quicksilver utilized SSDs to achieve more than 1 million I/O transactions per second, besting the performance of traditional disk-based systems by 250% while consuming only 55% of the overall power.

While SSD systems currently command a price premium, their costs, too, are falling steadily.

Business Benefits
Beyond Green

Storage systems sized correctly for your organization mean lower utility costs.

Efficient use of storage resources may delay data center upgrades that result from exponential growth.

Cloud storage can provide affordable scalability as growth outstrips internal capacity.

Behzad Behtash is an independent IT consultant who previously served as CIO of Tetra Tech EM and VP of systems for AIG Financial Products. Write to him at [email protected].

Photo by Bloomimage/Corbis

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