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Green IT
Green without the ‘gotcha’
October 30, 2009 – 2:26 pm
Reducing power consumption in the data center has moved from a nice-to-have to a necessity. No surprise that a ‘green’ drive sounds appealing for servers and storage systems.
Drive manufacturers have responded with new drives that use much less power than previous models.
Just be careful not to throw the enterprise ‘baby’ out with the bathwater. Green enterprise drives use less power, but are still enterprise drives under the covers. That means enterprise-level performance, reliability, RAID integration features.
IT administrators that focus on low power at the expense of other features have gotten burned with drives that may be labeled enterprise, but don’t cut the mustard when it comes to getting the job done.
Seagate enterprise drives, like the new Constellation drive, have ‘green’ features like PowerTrim and PowerChoice that reduce power while still meeting enterprise server and multi-drive storage requirements.
Photo courtesy of ispeech.org
Self-encrypting drives: destroy the data, not the drive
August 24, 2009 – 2:04 pm
SearchStorage is reporting today on the lengths to which companies go to destroy their old data. It’s not as easy as you might think.
They quote an Enterprise Strategy Group survey from June 2009 that shows how serious this data demolition business is for most companies:
- 82% have formal data destruction policies in place
- 53% use “brute force” methods, including physical destruction
- 35% use data destruction software
- 25% use home-grown tools.
Some say that the latter two groups are at risk, that there’s no efficient, effective way to completely erase data short of destruction. And the Brute Forcers are filling landfills with disk drive remains.
None of these solutions is ideal. Until self-encrypting drives came along, that is.
Drives like the Seagate Momentus (for notebooks) and the Seagate Cheetah, Savvio and Constellation (for servers and storage systems) can be fully self-encrypted, which means totally secure erasure is as simple as deleting the password. Poof! It’s done.
Seagate calls this Instant Secure Erase, and it’s included in every self-encrypting drive.
And there is no performance impact due to encryption, because it’s all done in hardware. Check out this video to see for yourself.
Instant, complete erasure, no performance impact, no user action required. Sounds pretty good, huh? Expect to see self-encrypting popping up everywhere.
Data centers are facing an Electricity Ceiling
August 12, 2009 – 8:56 am
Reducing data center power consumption is good for the planet and good for IT budgets. It can also mean extra cash.
PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) awarded Fortune Data Centers $900,000 for their energy efficiency enhancements in a San Jose, California data center.
This is stark evidence that one of the biggest challenges with IT energy consumption is a shortage of energy to consume. PG&E is willing to give a data center close to a million bucks in incentives because they don’t have enough power to go around. Power plants aren’t easily or quickly built.
Reducing electrical footprint with more efficient storage systems and servers is a foundational step to approach this issue. As a first step, check to make sure you are making maximum use of today’s most efficient enterprise storage devices, like the Seagate Constellation drive. Not all applications require the speediest (and highest power) devices.
Also check on your servers. Are you on a path to convert to the newer small form factor servers? They do the same thing as their older & bigger cousin with a lot less power. One way they do this is by using energy efficient 2.5″ enterprise disk drives like the Seagate Savvio drive.
Expect to see more “carrot” incentives from the energy infrastructure, as well as some ”sticks” as they run out of power. Either way, investment in a more efficient data center will pay off in a big way.
A missed opportunity: PC energy use
July 21, 2009 – 8:02 am
ComputerWorld points out a stark disparity between green IT hype and actual practice for Desktop IT managers.
- Forrester Research says only 13% of IT managers have implemented wide-scale power management for PCs.
- The EPA estimates that 10% or less of all enterprise PCs have their power management features turned on.
It’s not that they don’t care. Only 9% of those surveyed by Forrester had no interest in PC power management.
More likely is that the approximately $50 per year savings per PC doesn’t incite action, especially when the perception is that power-managed PCs under-perform.
This will change as energy costs rise and power management techniques become less and less disruptive. At the same time, storage power consumption continues to decline across the board, reducing energy use for every minute of every day. Take for example the Seagate Momentus 7200, Seagate’s highest performing notebook drive. It uses close to the same amount of power as its cousin the Momentus 5400 drive.
Rather than guess, let’s hear from IT managers. Why haven’t you enabled power management across all of your PCs?
Photo source: trendmicro.com
Four ways to make IT more energy efficient
July 9, 2009 – 8:01 am
Energy efficiency is goodness, never more than this year. That’s reflected in the IT industry with a never-more-than-now focus on reducing power consumption. But some of the most valuable efficiency improvements are the ones that go beyond the obvious.
1. Do less. This is the obvious one. In storage, slower disk drives can be used that use less power. But much like scrapping your car for a bike, it works for only some situations and can reduce effectiveness productivity.
2. Do things more efficiently. For storage, this is the best bang for your buck. At the drive level it means more efficient mechanisms and power management techniques that reduce overall Watts/GB. For systems, it’s designing smart, turning of sectors and components when not in use, MAID, etc. These investments pay off every minute of every day, year after year.
3. Reuse power. Largely untapped in IT is the concept of reuse. IBM is innovating here by using supercomputer heat to heat the data center.
4. Reuse disk drives. Seagate is making data center disk drives re-usable with encrypted erase, which instantly wipes drives totally clean of their old data. Ten percent of enterprise disk drives reused would save close to a million drives from the scrap heap.
What’s number 5?
Energy Star for storage: shift the focus to idle
June 17, 2009 – 8:13 am
The EPA is working on an Energy Star specification for storage systems, much like they’ve developed for servers.
Unlike the server specification, the EPA is focusing on power consumption by storage systems as they read and write data, vs. while they are idle. Big mistake. Storage is mostly about…well, storing. The biggest impact comes from the steady-state power draw over the hours, days, months and years the storage system operates – not the relatively rare moments when data is coming in or going out.
That’s like measuring the energy efficiency of a refrigerator only when you open the door.
Storage read/write utilization time varies by application of course. But on average it is low. Maybe we need a Mega Data Center specification and a more mainstream specification.
What am I missing here? Why focus on active storage power consumption vs. idle?
Comments welcome.
The SATA-ization of servers
June 1, 2009 – 10:56 am
Source: Ars Technica
Server technology is borrowing on a proven trend from storage with a new generation of cost-efficient architectures.
Over the past five years, data centers have been transformed by the addition of capacity-optimized disk drives like Seagate’s new Constellation drives. Whether you call them nearline, midline, business critical or enterprise SATA drives, they have not cannibalized enterprise disk drives as some expected, but actually expanded the demand for storage by accelerating data growth. The more data that could be stored efficiently, the more applications were created.
Dell’s new sub-blade server achitecture is a significant move in the same direction for servers. It’s not obvious if this trend works with or against the current of virtualization in servers, but one thing is clear: more efficient servers will not trash the existing server market, but will likely expand it by opening up new applications.
There’s latent demand for data-hungry applications. The more efficient servers and storage become, the more data will be created. The exponential data growth curve continues!
Financial data centers must grow and cut costs at the same time
May 28, 2009 – 9:09 am
“The markets aren’t stopping.”
Data Center Knowledge found this video summarizing a panel discussion at the Waters Power:09 Conference on financial firms’ data center trends. Emily Fraser’s interview with moderator Kevin McPartland from Tabb Group points to a dichotomy for most IT organizations today: the need to cut costs and grow at the same time.
Highlights:
- It’s all about cost savings right now, with a side green benefit to using less oil or power from the grid
- Power reduction solutions are focused at lower-level, tactical projects because the low-hanging fruit is mostly gone
- Firms still have to expand processing and storage capacity, due to continued growth in data. “The markets aren’t stopping.”
- New technologies, like data-centers-in-a-box from Microsoft and others, are being delayed due to the economic downturn.
- Firms are looking for ways to take less power from the grid with solar or geothermal technology. Google and Microsoft are leading the way; financial firms will follow.
Asset optimization: more data in less storage
March 18, 2009 – 5:30 am
InfoStor captured the gist of Needham & Company’s recent Enterprise Storage/DataCenter report: asset optimization.
Per Needham, after a relatively decent 2008 in which storage spending held up amazingly well, 2009 won’t be as pretty. Why? Asset optimization.
In both years, information continues to grow unabated. In 2008, the importance of this data helped storage budgets survive the fiscal axe that swept all sectors. Kind of like a more benevolent version of the AIG bonuses, storage had a retroactive edge over other investments.
For 2009, enough time has passed for companies to make a dent in de-coupling information growth from storage growth. Needham rightly predicts storage technologies that cram more information into less storage will be hot:
- De-duplication
- Compression
- Virtualization
- Thin provisioning
- Clustering
- Automated tiered storage
- Virtual tape libraries
- Power-managed disk drives and arrays
That last item includes a swath of technologies and choices within the storage array itself that reduce the energy footprint for whatever “optimized” data is crammed within it. It’s a powerful optimizer because it’s ubiquitous – and it pays back every minute of every day.
I’ve posted several times on this over at The Storage Effect. Here’s the most read post.
Since I wrote that, Seagate launched has an even stingier 2.5″ enterprise drive, the Seagate Constellation. It’s the lowest power server drive available.
You can almost hear a collective yelp of pain as our collective assets are optimized. Ultimately we’ll all be better off, with data being even more affordable and available.
Just in time for the next expansion.
