Walk in front of the data center energy crisis: recommended maid Technology

Energy efficiency has recently received a great deal of attention. Some people think this is a good "green" thing. Some people understand that this can achieve great financial benefits. But this is a more urgent thing for people in the storage and network industries. We are on the verge of an energy crisis. This crisis will fundamentally affect the lives of our professionals.

Consider these questions:

• According to the EPA's recent report, data centers consume more than 1.5% of the energy consumed in the United States each year.

· IDC reported that the data center each year more than 3.3 billion U.S. dollars in electricity.

• Data center cooling costs now exceed the cost of renting a data center site. For example, a 100,000-square-foot data center costs 6 million dollars a year for utilities.

· Gartner predicts that energy costs will consume 40% of the IT budget over the next five years.

According to power supply company Liebert, by 2012, 97% of the data center is expected to have no power (only two years!)

• Many government data centers have no power and cooling resources.

The current economic crisis and the changing political environment will surely accelerate these efforts and extend energy efficiency to other industries.

Data storage--the culprit of power consumption

As we all know, data storage is one of the main culprits of power consumption. The volume of data is growing rapidly. According to ESG, the growth rate of more than 50% per cent a year is common, with many companies growing at more than 50% per cent, especially in government agencies. The explosive growth of data storage requirements has significantly increased the footprint of storage hardware, offsetting the benefits of the energy efficiency of server consolidation through virtualization technology.

According to a study published by Infopro Wave 9, data center 40% is currently consumed in data storage. Why? Because we no longer delete data. Many people predict that more than 75% of data in the data center will be kept for longer periods of time. This is driven by business and compliance requirements, and future reuse of these data. These requirements affect almost every industry and business sector, such as manufacturing, retailing, services, finance, health care and government. As a result, most of the data available is kept on the hard disk and is expected to remain. This means that storage-related power consumption will continue to grow over time.

In the short term, some storage vendors have decided to use high-capacity Fibre Channel hard drives to replace existing low capacity fibre channel hard drives. While this may amount to gradual savings in power and cooling, this does not solve its own inherent problems. These hard drives, though large in size, still need to be powered on for 100% of the time. This does not stop the explosion of data growth, and does not reduce the growing demand for energy in the face of limited data center power and cooling capacity. In addition, the use of high-capacity hard drives to replace low capacity drives can also cause performance degradation.

Using a high-capacity hard drive to reduce energy efficiency is equivalent to replacing a 60-watt incandescent bulb with a 25-watt fluorescent lamp in one building. However, if the building is empty, why keep the light on?

Permanent data and transaction data

Data center administrators began to realize that 70% to 90% of their data were not transactional, but were rarely changed and frequently accessed permanent data. The quality of service requirements for persistent data are less stringent in terms of system performance (input/output per second), access latency, and current data access levels. Combine the lower quality levels of persistent data requirements with those of other storage systems that are optimized for permanent data (These include reliable long-term data retention, higher reliability, higher data integrity, lower power and cooling, less footprint, etc.), You have something to start tackling the energy crisis in the data store.

The key to managing persistent data is to deploy a storage system that is tailored to this requirement. An ideal technique for permanent data is maid (large, inactive disk array) storage. A maid based system that covers less area reduces the power consumption of the hard drive by powering up and limiting the maximum number of hard drives that are used at any time, only when needed. Because unwanted hard drives are standby and shutdown, the maid technology consumes less power, reduces the supply of running hard drives, and reduces the power to cool hard drives. Limiting power consumption can reduce the energy cost of the data center and improve the life cycle of the hard disk itself. This will improve the reliability of the entire hard disk and enhance data protection. All of these properties are ideal for persistent data accessibility requirements.

Some maid techniques also control where to write the data and how to access it. This increased intelligence allows the user to completely turn off the power of the hard drive (not just the speed of the hard drive). This allows for more dense hard drive encapsulation and more energy-efficient array racks, saving more power and data center ground space.

Energy and save money

The latest maid technology has increased the energy efficiency of the storage system to a very high level, with the storage industry's largest single product capacity, each storage device energy cost savings of 75% to 90%, will occupy less space 5 times times the advantages. This saving result is very tempting, with four years of power and cooling costs expected to save 9.5 million to 13 million dollars compared to storing data in a traditional disk array. However, more enticing than saving is that data centers may not even have the power to store and manage data as usual.

Power and cooling considerations once limited the size of an uninterruptible power supply, which now limits how the data center expands to meet future business needs. When planning for storage growth, data center administrators now have to consider the environmental impact of any device they want to install. Traditional storage technology does not solve this problem. To avoid the energy crisis in your datacenter, you need to identify your growing number of permanent data and move this data to smarter, more energy-efficient storage systems.