The Storage Economist

In my previous blog, I started a discussion on power consumption, control and the impact storage has in the data center. This is a front-and-center issue in Australia, and requires new thinking and new investments to sustain government goals and industry trends.

From a pure storage architecture perspective, there are 3 general areas that can be considered to reduce and impact the power cost/usage on a per TB basis. The focus has to be on optimizing what you already have installed, introducing new and better architectures for organic growth, and continuing consolidation activities whenever possible. The following outline of proposals and actionable plans present some basic ideas that have worked for customers (around the world) to reduce environmental resource consumption and costs on a per TB rate base.

1. Better improve storage capacity utilizationand designs for the systems that are already plugged in and running
   1. Virtualization to simplify and optimize older arrays (and in the process probably retire some of the older ones)
   2. Space reclamation with over provisioning, thin volume, ZPR
   3. Squeeze more existing TB out of the kilowatts already in use
   4. Hot/cold rows to improve air flow, consumption
2. Introduce technologies and new architecturesfor net-new growth
1. Tiered storage, data movement based on age and use to lower tiers
2. High density, low power drives for lower tiers
3. Spin-down disk for less frequent tiers
4. Hybrid cloud, off-site migration (where alternate site has better power rates) for lower tiers
5. SSD as well as page-based tiering as much as practical
6. Virtualization for faster migration to reduce the overlapping space and power costs common in most migration projects
7. Move some workload to hosting centers that have already optimized architectures and power solutions
3. Consolidation, tech refresh (fewer moving parts, fewer assets)
1. Virtualization to collapse and migrate many smaller systems into a single, more efficient (virtual) pool of storage
2. Consolidation of SAN, NAS filers, older arrays