“IT-Equipment worldwide is responsible for 2% of C02 emissions which corresponds to the amounts of CO2 emitted by airplanes.“ Simon Mingay, Gartner
Across Europe long-term energy prices are going in one direction - up. With judicious planning however, costs and consumption can be dramatically lowered across IT operations, even in storage, which is not the primary energy saving challenge in the data centre. Servers with high performance processors are consuming a lot more power and producing a high amount of heat. But even 15%–20% of the data centre’s power consumption is storage based.
Thus it makes sense to consider how to save energy in storage environments. Fujitsu Siemens Computers is very keen on evaluating new technologies and strategies to reduce the current energy consumptions. MAID (Massive Array of Idle/Inactive Disks) and SSD (Solid State Disks) are only two examples.
We recommend a three step approach:
1. Optimize data management This is the part where you can save the most energy – almost for free
Delete unused data
ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) – store date according to performance and security needs (tape vs. disk / SAS vs. SATA etc.)
2. Optimize infrastructure Consolidation is the key
Consolidate direct attached storage to one external array
CentricStor consolidates your tape backup environment (Makes tape fit for ILM through True Tape Virtualization)
A new FibreCAT SX80 with 6 SATA disks consumes only 10% of the power needed for an old FibreCAT S80 with 56 FC disks (both with 4 TB storage capacity for comparison).
This saves you over 2.500€ of energy costs per year.
