Rising storage power and cooling costs are expected to plateau and level off by the 2013-2014 timeframe, according to an analysis by International Data Corporation (IDC). Several key trends were cited as reasons: the migration to smaller (2.5in.), more energy efficient enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs); greater utilization of existing storage capacity; and the continued adoption of solid state drives (SSDs) and various other storage efficiency technologies (e.g., data deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning).
Much of this was brought about according to the economic challenges of 2008 and 2009, which according to IDC, began to modify the behaviors of IT managers and system OEMs to focus on the adoption of cost-efficient storage strategies. Though the focus on costs, lower power, and cooling will remain, IDC’s group vice president of Storage Systems David Reinsel, expects that the trend will not sustain as storage capacity continues to grow. “Once the migration to cost-efficient hardware and strategies is complete, the steady expansion in capacity will result in renewed growth in energy costs,” Reinsel stated.
Even so, the move toward small form factors and more efficient drives overall has provided for increasingly more efficient data centers. So for the longterm, the energy and cost-savings will remain as benefits, regardless of the growth of capacity and storage use.
The IDC report, A Plateau in Sight for the Rising Costs to Power and Cool the World’s External Storage? (Doc #225016), evaluates enterprise storage power and cooling costs in light of the economic crisis that began in 2008, the increasing adoption of storage efficiency technologies, and the change in assumptions around the adoption of more efficient hardware technology (e.g., small form factor HDDs and SSDs). It also puts this cost into perspective to the overall costs of acquiring and managing storage hardware.
I’m curious about the trends on the migration to smaller and more energy efficient enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs).Is this trend will continue?
I see some HDD producers have released smaller and efficient products. But how small and efficient will reached?
The trend for the transition to 2.5-inch form factor for enterprise is expected to continue. More OEMs have continued adoption for servers and some have begun to use them for higher capacity storage systems as well. There are many benefits of the form factor – obviously lower power, but also more performance-per-U (rack) as well.
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