- by David Garrels

There’s a lot of “greenwashing” going on in the IT world today – vendors talking about their “green IT” strategy in so many different ways it becomes very confusing (buy a pc, plant a tree?). I’ve even seen vendors show up at tradeshows having changed their company logo & booth color to green, just to show how green they really are.

Interesting, but I think “green IT” is first and foremost about getting your business done – and then applying “green” concepts to drive better business outcomes AND better environmental outcomes.

Energy costs are going up (it’s generally accepted that you’ll spend three times as much on powering and cooling your IT hardware over its life as you do acquiring it). Systems are getting more dense and requiring more power. Data centers are “out of power” – i.e. they couldn’t get more power into their data center if they wanted to. And the demands for IT compute and storage resources show no signs of slowing down. These are business problems we can help solve them with green solutions.

After Cooling and Servers, Storage is the #3 power draw in a typical data center. The biggest “culprits” in an array are the spinning drives, whether they’re empty or full, whether they’re idle or busy. And there are three key tools/techniques you can use today to minimize the number of drives in your systems:

#1 – Thin Provisioning/Dynamic Capacity Management. This basically allows you to configure your system to the amount/size of data you’ll need in the future, but only install the number of physical drives that you need now (add more drives when you need them without re-configuring your systems). We’ve seen 40-45% power savings in some cases

#2 – Using “big” drives with storage tiering. A 500GB drive uses about the same power as a 146GB drive (but holds ~70% more). Setting up a disk group with “big” drives to hold data like client pc files can yield a 50% power savings.

#3 – De-dup and Archive. Backing up the same data twice or keeping an “untouched” file spinning forever on disk is a waste of space and therefore power. Using the de-duplication in VLS libraries and archiving un-used data to tape can be between a 40% and 100% savings in power (no on-going power required to keep data on a tape!).

These three techniques are relatively simple things you can do today to save power in your data center. Saving power means either saving money or extending the life of your data center. Those are both better business outcomes that IT can drive. And “green”? Sure, because we all want to save energy and drive better environmental outcomes wherever we can.