Saving on data-centre energy and space

Weera Areeratanasak , country manager for NetApp (Thailand)

Are you, like many others, running out of data centre power and space?

In some cases, the data centre simply cannot expand any further, but building a new one can take years of planning and construction as well as a large capital investment. Compounding these difficulties is the heightened public concern about the environmental impact of carbon emissions due to electricity generation and the potential for new legislation to restrain energy consumption by data centres.

The attention of many organisations is currently focused on the physical consolidation of servers via blades and virtualisation software. Storage systems, the second largest consumer of power and space in data centres, offer another major opportunity to improve efficiency.

Storage decisions that you make today can mean efficiency gains. At the highest level, data-centre automation software for storage provides heterogeneous visibility across the entire storage infrastructure, allowing organisations to establish a baseline level of storage-asset efficiency. This software helps users monitor their storage use while also reducing operational expenditures related to troubleshooting, performance analysis and reporting.

Basic features such as Raid6, snapshots and writeable snapshots help to realise efficiencies. Advanced features such as de-duplication and thin provisioning enable further storage-resource efficiency, reducing the need to provide physical storage. Finally, disk-to-disk data backups can provide a 20:1 or greater space-saving ratio while enabling efficient data recovery from disk.

According to industry estimates, the rate at which storage is used averages 25 to 40 per cent. This means that the average IT organization uses less than half of the storage they buy. In addition, much of the data stored on disk is redundant. This is especially true in virtual-server environments in which the same server-operating system and application software are stored repeatedly in each virtual machine. Not only is this a waste of storage, it is a waste of power and floor space, all of which increase IT costs

Users have achieved savings in operational costs by implementing the features above. They have also achieved reductions in storage use ranging from 10 per cent to 70 per cent and annual power savings of more than US$2 million (Bt71.24 million), while requiring only half of the hardware.

Are you running out of data centre power and space? What are you waiting for?