Inventory: Eight energy-saving strategies for data centers

Most of the existing energy-saving technologies do not take into account the main factors of electric power demand growth. They only consider how to reduce the overall energy consumption cost. There are more effective ways for enterprises to save energy and improve efficiency for data centers. As long as data is efficiently stored and the number of machines and disks is reduced, the rapidly increasing energy consumption can be solved. This policy not only reduces system complexity and costs, but also improves network efficiency and performance, so as to better respond to new business needs.

1. Integrated servers and storage systems

The server itself consumes half of the data center's energy, and the storage system is another major energy consumer. In fact, the increase in the number of window file servers and directly attached storage systems has led to an increase in the number of window data. Therefore, you only need to set up a storage network, integrate servers and storage systems, and reduce the number of devices. The available energy of the data center can rapidly increase, thus improving energy efficiency.

2. Select a high-capacity disk drive

A typical SATA disk drive saves about half of the energy compared with a fiber Channel drive of the same capacity. They also provide the highest available storage density for disk drives, further reducing energy consumption. Some SATA disks with disk repair and data protection technologies are becoming increasingly popular and become the ideal choice for many enterprise applications.

3. Reduce the number of disk drives to prevent disk faults

SATA disk drives have more data storage than fiber channel primary disk drives, but we cannot ignore data reliability. The current popular Dual-range (Dual-parity) RAID-DP delivers higher storage utilization and error tolerance, while simultaneously repairing data on two faulty disk drives.

4. transfer data to a more efficient storage system

To ensure the most effective use of storage resources, data can be transferred to the sub-storage system to reduce the load on the primary storage. A complete information server can automatically transfer data with a low access rate from the primary storage to a storage system with high storage efficiency.

5. Improve utilization

According to industry estimates, the storage utilization rate is only 25%-40%, that is, about 60%-75% of the storage capacity has not been used, but is constantly consuming energy. Some solutions on the market can effectively solve this problem. Through shared storage, all disks can access data, with an average storage utilization of up to 60%.

6. single solution and multiple applications

As long as you have mastered the data backup tips, you can greatly save storage space. First, only the changed data is stored. Second, data backup is used to implement multiple different applications to reduce dependencies on specific storage systems. Backup systems are also used for verification and asynchronous disaster recovery to reduce the number of specific storage systems, save more energy. Third, the Deduplication technology can avoid repeated backup of excess data stored in the primary disk array, so as to reduce the need for increased storage capacity.

7. Reduce the storage required for testing and development

Testing and development require multiple data backups, which puts a heavy burden on the Storage Architecture. Emerging technologies help enterprises establish multiple real-time virtual data backups, accelerate testing and deployment of new applications, and reduce the storage required.

8. Evaluate Energy Efficiency

The final step is to regularly evaluate the energy efficiency of the storage system to better understand the system's energy consumption.

The above eight steps are sufficient to cope with the energy and space growth of the data center in the next few years, and ensure that the storage architecture supports business development.

The energy consumption of data centers is a serious problem faced by enterprises. To improve data management capabilities and storage efficiency, in addition to saving costs for enterprises, more importantly, to protect our planet, create a green world to protect the blue sky.