Even in these recessionary times. Green IT continues to gain momentum. This, according to a recent survey from Symantec, which states: “Virtually all the companies surveyed are discussing their Green strategy. They are not just talking, either. Green budgets are on the rise and IT is more than willing to pay a premium on energy efficient products…”
Citing this survey, analyst and consultant George Crump argues in an article in Byte and Switch today that energy savings are possible in many areas of IT, including storage.
Update: also found this article on TechTarget that’s a little incomplete, but worth a read nevertheless — Green storage best practices control costs, increase energy efficiency.
Writes Crump:
“I admit it, I was wrong. I assumed that green IT initiatives would be put on the back burner as we slogged our way through the current recession but according to a recent survey by Symantec apparently just the opposite is happening. Will green storage be a key part of the green IT effort?”
The answer could well be “yes.” In fact, there is a green side to data reduction, which as many are aware has been a very hot topic lately–especially in light of the recent battle between storage giants NetApp and EMC over archive deduplication leader Data Domain.
Crump argues that one of the greenest forms of storage is tape, which doesn’t require any power or cooling.
He also notes: “While disk archives that leverage clustered storage will have some difficulty in powering down drives since data is distributed across nodes in the cluster, they could power manage the nodes in the cluster itself. Of course, they gain power efficiency through greater density per node - bigger drives, compression and deduplication.”
Crump is discussing archive storage here, and cites Permabit as a solution for that realm. There is no doubt that data reduction for primary storage is a particularly key way to reduce one’s storage footprint. Primary storage, by its very nature doesn’t lend itself to tape, because the data is being kept online. Dedupe is therefore becoming a must-have, with all the leading vendor offering some type of it for their primary storage. For those who would like notably better results, a next-generation solution such as Ocarina is a way to further shrink files. The results–lower power, cooling and space usage. Green indeed.
[...] the results of Symantec’s Green IT Report that surveyed