– (editor note – this post comes to us from Greg White in storage marketing. Thanks Greg)
Many organizations have been looking to desktops, notebooks and servers for power and cooling savings and the associated environmental benefits of green IT solutions. What about storage?
Up to this point, storage has lagged far behind because the lowest hanging fruit has been in other areas. Server virtualization and system management have been able to provide large savings in power and cooling for organizations of all sizes.
Now, storage is beginning to take center stage in this debate. Green storage opportunities fall into three key areas: components, platforms and methodology.
New storage arrays are starting to take some of the learnings from the server guys and putting in more efficient power supplies, variable speed fans and more efficient disk drives.
In addition, the platforms are doing more to address efficiency, like utilizing virtual provisioning and de-dupe technologies to increase resource utilization and reduce the number of drives that need power – the biggest source of most storage arrays power consumption.
Lastly, organizations are looking more at how, where and for how long they store data. While tape may be cumbersome to recover from in a short period of time, it is still much more power efficient than storing data on hard drives, and where disk storage is desired, there are new options like low power SATA drives that can be deployed.
Are these new improvements in storage leading you to start factoring storage into your power and cooling planning? Is green storage a key consideration, something that is nice to have, or not even on your radar now?