The Storage Economist

I have been working this past week in Mumbai and Bangalore India, but still trying to keep connected with 2 hot topics in my world of storage economics: Storage Clouds and greenhouse emission standards coming out of Copenhagen this week. Let me see if I can reconcile these 2 topics in one blog entry…

First is a good summary on internal Storage Cloud benefits from Network Computing. One part of this article articulates an area that will have significant impact on environmental costs for cloud storage. In this article we read –

“However, there are also trade-offs. Cloud storage is best suited to unstructured data, such as medical images, engineering drawings, and Office documents. For another, because each x86 server isn’t as reliable as a high-end enterprise disk array, a private cloud must store copies of the data on multiple nodes. This requires more raw disk space than an enterprise disk array using a RAID-5 or 6 system. For example, if you set a policy for your private cloud to keep three copies of a 60-GB file for data protection, it would require 180 GB of disk, whereas a 6+2 RAID-6 system would need just 80 GB.”

Storage economic basics shows us that price is only about 20% of the total cost of storage, and in this example having to purchase 100GB of raw space more for the same usable capacity/application will certainly impact total costs. Not to mention the accompanying Intel servers that are used in these storage clouds. When looking at the total storage/server landscape for a large cloud cluster recently, the excess amounts of servers and storage made a significant impact to floor space, power and cooling. Granted these new flexible storage architectures provide real benefits, but there are real costs too.

With a recent client, we did a side-by-side comparison of Intel/JBOD node clusters, DAS and SAN architectures. When we isolated the power and cooling costs, we found some remarkable differences in the total carbon footprint of these solutions. See the 4-year storage carbon footprint comparison below:

Now this is where the Copenhagen Treaty and other green initiatives comes into the discussion. At a time when we look to cheap and deep storage cloud designs, there may be a hidden ‘devil in the details’ when we look at data center environmental costs. Green storage may present a darker side to some types (JBOD) of cloud architectures. eChannelline offers storage virtualization as a near term option to consider for agile private storage cloud designs.