• Home
• Articles Archive
• Features List

• Media Pack
• Contact Us
• Subscribe

WHAT WILL BE THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET?

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 3 - May 2007

Gone are the days when energy costs, power availability and their often dire environmental consequences can be ignored. The greening of technology is well underway and we all have our part to play in ensuring its success

Climate change is one of the most important global issues facing mankind. There is growing recognition that our traditional energy supplies are neither endless nor secure, and an increased understanding of how their use and overuse is harmful to our environment.

As a consequence, governments, corporations and individuals are taking action to raise awareness, and curb excessive and damaging use of energy resources. Organisations of all sizes are compelled by budgets, business efficiency, competition, legislation and their own environmental conscience to make greener technology choices.

A major consumer of electrical power is the IT infrastructure within all organisations. The energy consumption profiles of individual IT products are under scrutiny in ways they have never been before. One area where substantial green gains can be realised is in the archival storage of business information.

Organisations are required to retain strategic business records for longer periods of time. This is being driven by industry regulations, corporate policies on risk management and a competitive need to exploit fully valuable information assets. Digital documents of all types, and across all industries, are routinely retained for many years or decades. This can include financial transactions, medical records, pharmaceutical trials, legal and law enforcement documents, engineering designs, maintenance and safety logs, emails, human resource information, and cultural or historic documents.

Archive records are characterised by a number of key attributes and requirements. Unlike data that is being actively created or modified, archive documents are static and, in many cases, must be carefully protected against alteration. Access to archive data is also different to that of active data, since they must be available for long periods of time, but recall can be very random and infrequent. Archive systems have a direct environmental impact through the tonnes of carbon produced each year to generate the electricity required to power them.

As this greater consciousness of behaving responsibly towards our planet kicks in, several vendors have committed themselves to playing their part, and have now joined The Green Grid, a non-profit consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centres and business computing ecosystems. The Green Grid is said to be the first industry initiative chartered to take a holistic view of the computing ecosystem, with a focus on addressing the pressing issues facing data centre users.

The collective viewpoint of The Green Grid members is that energy efficiency in the data centre is the most significant issue facing technology providers and their customers today. This situation is not only due to exponential increases in power and cooling costs over the past few years, but also because customer demand for concentrated computing is significantly outpacing the availability of clean reliable power in many places around the world.

One of those members, Brocade, is fully focused on meeting its data centre customers' requirements. "That's why it was imperative to join The Green Grid and actively work with like-minded companies to meet future challenges around improving energy efficiency," says Tom Buiocchi, Brocade vice president of worldwide marketing. "Coupling the strong energy advances we've built into Brocade's products with the common efforts of our peers is an important step in advancing the larger industry effort around energy efficiency in the data centre."

Bruce Shaw, director of The Green Grid, describes Brocade as bringing "invaluable insight in the area of network storage, which is an important factor to consider when determining overall data centre efficiency. Brocade's guidance will help our organisational mission to develop metrics and set standards to improve energy efficiency, in both new and existing data centres".

As another contributing member, Novell is working with other vendors in The Green Grid - such as AMD, Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft - to develop technology which aims to reduce data centre energy usage globally. Through this collaboration, Novell will help customers to reduce the power consumption in their data centres, through the operating system virtualisation built into the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform and the management tools that comprise the Novell ZENworks product suite. As a result, customers can lower the cost of managing their data centres, at the same time helping the environment.

"It is critical that customers find solutions for making their data centres energy efficient without slowing down the speed of business," remarks Eric Anderson, vice president of engineering at Novell. "Working with The Green Grid, Novell will further help to shape efficient data centres by contributing to the development of technology standards and best practices that decrease power consumption, while increasing productivity."

Rick Schuckle, director of The Green Grid, has been quick to pay tribute to those companies now stepping forward and putting their weight behind the organisation.
"Novell's commitment to The Green Grid, in conjunction with our other key industry organisations, raises awareness for this escalating challenge and demonstrates the possibility of developing real-world business solutions that are a win-win for corporations and the community," he says.

COPAN Systems has also become a member of The Green Grid. A provider of data storage solutions based upon its intelligent, enterprise-class enhanced MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) platform, its products have been designed specifically to address power consumption issues.

"Power consumption levels in the data centre are at an unprecedented high and will only increase," states Roger Archibald, senior vice president of marketing and business development for COPAN Systems. "Soon, data centre managers will be seeing up to forty per cent of their total budget attributed just to energy. Storage alone already consumes more than thirty per cent of the total energy in a typical enterprise data centre. The explosion of persistent data, or data that is retained for long periods of time, compounds this problem, as customers continue to add more and more capacity to manage it."

According to a recent survey of data centre managers conducted by The InfoPro, the average installed SAN disk storage capacity in Fortune 1000 organisations increased from 138 TB in early 2004 to more than 680 TB in October 2006. Given this growth rate of 230%, the amount of data expected to be stored and managed by Fortune 1000 companies will be 8 petabytes by 2009. "Implementing COPAN's Enhanced MAID platform can save these customers between $5.7 million and $7.8 million in power and cooling costs over a four-year time period," says the company.

"With the recent passing of the HR5646, which mandates that federal data centres put energy conservation at the top of their minds when procuring equipment, more and more companies will be looking into the skyrocketing data centre power and cooling costs, and what can be done to reduce energy consumption."
COPAN Systems recognised these growing issues early, implementing the energy considerations into their product planning nearly four years ago.

The lead provided by these and other members of the grid must surely be the beginning of a groundswell in favour of eco-friendly technology that combines consideration for our planet with sound business process. That way, both can still have a future and hopefully flourish. ST