I had an old stack of articles, destined for my airplane downtime/read-time. I came across a great article that I must have missed from last month’s Storage Magazine, this article is Power costs put the squeeze on storage. I recommend the read, even if you do not have TCO models that need to be updated.

 Some take-away points that I am incorporating in my environmental econ pitch:

• We are nearing the point where the environmental costs for 3-4 years will be more than the purchase cost of storage infrastructure
• Planners need to consider 6kW and more per rack in the data center
• 2.5″ drives pull 5 volts each, and up to 12 volts for 3.5″ drives, but there is more power cost than the sum of the drives/volts (controllers, cache, ports)
• IT architects need to start using TB-per-square ft and TB-per-kW in plans
• Energy bills can be $60/sq. ft.

The current power and cooling growth may be unsustainable, but there are things to do now to flatten the cost curve:

1. Increase utilization of the array to increase the power/square ft. This can be done with a variety of activities
2. Implement tiered storage, since all data storage and access patterns are not the same
3. Rearrange the data center to get better cooling efficiencies. This may offset savings in floor space over time…..
4. Push more data off-line to tape, MAID or other data-at-rest technologies
5. Tech refresh may help with per-unit costs of cooling and power, since newer devices are more efficient

I also liked the comments about storage de-commissioning, and the costs to end-of-life the equipment and remove all data from disk systems. This may have to be added to the type of storage costs, it may be number 33……

Click here for other blog entries on environmental economics with storage.

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