I was reading some old articles while at the airport yesterday; several sent to me from colleagues around the world were on the topic of environmental costs and the IT impact to electricity consumption. I have noted this impact in a recent blog as electricity costs are one of the 32 that make up storage TCO. Another blog talked about PG&E offering rebates to IT shops that employ some power saving measures within the architecture.

I cannot make reference to all of these articles, but they come from Wall Street Journal, ComputerWorld, Enterprise Storage Forum and ITPro. Here are some summary points for review related to storage, IT and power consumption:

1. Power consumption represents 40% of the data center run-rate costs
2. 60-70% of data center power is used for cooling
3. Heat and power density is becoming a greater challenge that availability
4. Power consumptions for the data centers breaks-down as follows:
• Servers - 40%
• Storage - 36%
• Network - 23%
5. Storage racks (19″) consume on average 5-8kW
6. HP Dynamic Smart Cooling appears to be some great technology (reactive) to monitor hot-spots in racks and arrays
7. In the UK, electricity prices are rising at an annual rate of >10%
8. Cost of electricity in Europe is 2x that of the US

 So what are we to do? The growth of data and storage suggest that we have an unsustainable environmental situation. There are best practices and technology and architectures that will reduce the storage power consumption, and start to flatten-out the power vs. growth curve. Basically, we have to look at the devices and architectures, and consider BTU and kVA in planning, but more of getting better asset utilization out of what is already there. Just becuase storage is getting cheaper to buy, it is not getting cheaper to own.

Some ideas to curb the power consumption while dealing with the growth curve are listed below:

• Use power monitoring tools to troubleshoot hot spots, this is reactive
• Get better utilization of current assets (ROA), so that additional hardware installations can be deferred
• Consider storage tiering to achieve a better kW-per-TB ratio
• Storage thin provisioning, to again defer storage purchases
• MAID

There is no doubt that closer tracking of IT power consumption has to factor in to storage TCO analysis and architecture decisions. Blade technology, storage virtualization, high density drives, multi-protocol fabrics are great, but with this new innovation comes an even greater need to architect-in power and cooling factors into cost reduction and desgin plans.

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