Sustainable Data Storage Services - Data Islandia
October 22nd, 2007
Last week at SNW, one of the hottest topics was “Green”. Every vendor promoted their “Green” technology, which often was nothing more than the use of larger capacity disks or tapes to replace lower capacity disks. While I agree that any thing that enables us to store more data capacity for less power consumption can be considered “Green” technology. However, this technology alone does not enable sustainable data storage. Sustainability requires investment, planning, and measurable results, as Ted Samson points out in this blog on Sustainable IT. More companies, Like Wal-Mart are shifting toward this concept as I pointed out in my post last week. I am pleased to be able to report on another company that is taking this approach. That company is Data Islandia in Iceland, a company that Jon Toigo blogged about a year ago.
Data Islandia is a data services company that manages Green data centers in Iceland for high security data retention and Information Lifecycle Management. Their data management policies are honed to minimize environmental footprint. New data facilities are designed with Icelandic conditions in mind. For example, passive-cooling techniques are used to take advantage of Iceland’s year-round cool, low-humidity climate. They are committed to the efficient and responsible use of energy and resources, and consider energy efficiency and carbon emissions in their purchase of equipment and services. Their major data center facilities are powered entirely by renewable energy. The services they provide enable their clients to outsource and greatly reduce their energy expenditures and avoid costly facilities expansion.
While virtualization may be considered a “green” technology, Sol Squire, the managing director of Data Islandia, makes a similar distinction as Ted does between “green” technology and “sustainable” technology:
“The virtualization of digital toxic waste, which is what six-month-old information really is, is not a great saving to the corporate interest,” said Sol Squire, managing director of data archiving provider, Data Islandia, at the recent Data Centres Europe event in London, pointing out that processing unnecessary data is still a waste of time and money, not to mention fossil fuels, even if you’re using a 20% more efficient server.
“In the end it is much more energy efficient to apply a policy that reduces the amount of data stored, and ensures that it is stored on the right media,” he added. “Data that is not appropriately stored is now a liability. It is about accountability and taking responsibility. That addresses the issue as far as we’re concerned about how you can get a lot greener quite quickly.”
To that end, Data Íslandia recently joined with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) to provide global services in archival data management for multinational corporations. The base storage platform for this service will be the Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP) which provides the ability to ingest data from multiple ISVs using standard protocols, provide one “gold” copy of a content object, provide a common search across multiple modalities, set policies to shred data after a retention period, scale to petabytes of storage, and migrate seamlessly across generations of storage technologies using the virtualization capabilities of the USP V. These features enhance Data Islandia’s capabilities around cost-effective business intelligence, data mining, normalization, and multinational compliance for sustainable data storage services.
Hu,
I can see the point you are trying to make regarding trivializing “Green”. Green is about more than the relentless 50+ year drive the Storage Industry has been on to put more data in less space, make it more accessible, faster to store and retrieve, at less cost. It is easy to be seduced by any metric that is calculated as “Something” per terabyte: In this we (the storage industry, especially HDD manufacturers) have all done a great job.
At Pillar we certainly try to improve efficiency: measured in deliverables (other than TB) per watt, or BTU. Hardware and Software Systems that allow extraction of more of what a customer needs for less cost to buy or operate is what we at Pillar are trying to build.
Retention policies and the like can have far greater impact on the relative “green” factor of a data center. The compounded growth rate for data storage is so large that compression and de-duplication only buys us a year or two relief in capacity growth requirements.
I think the quote above from Sol Squire however is a bit extreme, and your own blog site is a good example of why I think so…unless you are OK referring to your Blog posts from October 2005 through April 2007 as “toxic waste”?
We may be a competitor, but even I read your Blogs and although I don’t love them all, I wouldn’t refer to many of them as “toxic waste”.
Mike Workman
CEO Pillar Data Systems
[…] In April I have been asked to participate in several conferences on the topic of Green. Next Tuesday, I will be speaking at Data Center World Spring 2008 Conference on Eco-friendly data centers during the keynote at 9:00am on April 1. I will also be attending SNW, April 7 to 10 where there will be a number of sessions addressing Green. SNIA will sponsor a tutorial track devoted to Green Storage. Sol Squire from Data Islandia who I have blogged about before, will be presenting in a session at 1110 am on Monday April 7 on best practices and technical considerations in building a Green Data Center. […]
[…] In April I have been asked to participate in several conferences on the topic of Green. Next Tuesday, I will be speaking at Data Center World Spring 2008 Conference on Eco-friendly data centers during the keynote at 9:00am on April 1. I will also be attending SNW, April 7 to 10 where there will be a number of sessions addressing Green. SNIA will sponsor a tutorial track devoted to Green Storage. Sol Squire from Data Islandia who I have blogged about before, will be presenting in a session at 1110 am on Monday April 7 on best practices and technical considerations in building a Green Data Center. […]
[…] In April I have been asked to participate in several conferences on the topic of Green. Next Tuesday, I will be speaking at Data Center World Spring 2008 Conference on Eco-friendly data centers during the keynote at 9:00am on April 1. I will also be attending SNW, April 7 to 10 where there will be a number of sessions addressing Green. SNIA will sponsor a tutorial track devoted to Green Storage. Sol Squire from Data Islandia who I have blogged about before, will be presenting in a session at 1110 am on Monday April 7 on best practices and technical considerations in building a Green Data Center. […]
[…] In April I have been asked to participate in several conferences on the topic of Green. Next Tuesday, I will be speaking at Data Center World Spring 2008 Conference on Eco-friendly data centers during the keynote at 9:00am on April 1. I will also be attending SNW, April 7 to 10 where there will be a number of sessions addressing Green. SNIA will sponsor a tutorial track devoted to Green Storage. Sol Squire from Data Islandia who I have blogged about before, will be presenting in a session at 1110 am on Monday April 7 on best practices and technical considerations in building a Green Data Center. […]