• 
• 

Published on August 5, 2007

Akkamon Srihiran, a program manager at US-based EMC Information Systems (Thailand), is helping large data centres in Thailand to go green.

Data-centre resources need to be optimised so as to help minimise environmental impact, says the 38-year-old, who earned a degree in computer science from King Mongkut Institute of Technology Lat Krabang in 1990.

"It's estimated that from 2007-2010 the amount of new data created will outgrow the world's capacity to store those bits and bytes," says Akkamon, whose company recently hosted a conference of Asia-Pacific executives in Bangkok.

"One solution is to de-duplicate all the files whenever possible. For instance, telecom companies or hospitals or banks or manufacturing enterprises may have three to four copies of a single file of data; they could reduce the identical files to just one copy, thus reducing backup and other resources.

"When there are changes or corrections to these files, then we store these changes and corrections separately, without overriding the previous files. However, when the files are called up for use, it will be seamless," he says.

"The Internet and the digital economy have meant the amount of new data is growing very fast - every second, minute, hour and day. Digital cameras are a good example, as more and more pictures and videos are being uploaded onto the Net.

"In the old days a still image would be a relatively small file. But now we could have a very fine image of, say, an apple, taking up eight megabytes. So we need new techniques to manage and store the data.

"Suppose I send that eight-megabyte picture to 10 friends, then a total of 11 copies are created. If each of my friends then forwarded that image to 10 addresses, there would be a total of 111 copies.

"The point is to store only one single instance of that image so that the data can be accessed from one source only instead of multiple sources. In other words, the solution allows all users to know where the data is and tracks who's using that data.

"Instead of sending 10 copies to 10 addresses, it tells 10 people who is using what data. Overall, the bits and bytes in cyber world are cut down [by removing redundancies]," Akkamon explains.

For the environment, this means less electricity consumption by computer servers, which generate heat, and therefore less energy use for air-conditioning; less backup resources; and less manual labour.

In other words, it's more efficient, since we would store similarities only once while dissimilarities, which usually account for 10-20 per cent of the total data, are stored separately.

This means we do not have to throw away copies and there is no deletion. Company and other logos are a good example of repeated duplication, but videos are duplicated far less.

For the de-duplicating solutions, the high-growth areas include still images, TV images and surveillance data.

"Overall, the amount of data will grow by 5-7 times in the next five years. Just imagine the billions of high-resolution digital pictures, countless emails, videos, MMS and other digital content out there," says Akkamon.

"If we could manage it more efficiently, we would save energy and thus help reduce the effects of global warming. We would also reduce the need for physical space for storage centres."

According to Paul Goetz, an EMC vice president, energy is currently the second largest cost related to data centre operations, accounting for more than 10 per cent of a business enterprise's IT budget.

The total power and cooling expense for all servers in the US alone is estimated at around US$14 billion (Bt473 billion) annually. By the end of this decade, that bill is projected to rise to $50 billion.

Nophakhun Limsamarnphun

nop1122@yahoo.com