Green IT

Leverage Green Storage to Drive Data Center Efficiencies

As information growth continues unabated and the costs associated with managing, storing, and protecting information continue to rise, green initiatives are driving the efficiencies that will be needed for future storage management. Today, floor space in most metropolitan areas continues to be a scarce commodity and the cost per square foot continues to escalate. In addition, the cost of power for systems and IT environmental cooling continue to be a concern, and in many parts of the US are also becoming a scarce commodity. Couple these factors with IT budget pressures brought on by the tightening economic conditions during 2009, and the need for denser and more efficient information storage has become a top priority of many IT professionals.

Technological advances continue to help address these issues from several perspectives:

Hard Drive and Server Technology

Hard Drive and server technology continues to advance on a similar path as processor technology, with improvements every 18 months.

• Hard drive density has been increasing approximately 100 percent every 18 to 24 months. The earlier 500 GB 3.5" disk drives are being replaced by 1 TB 3.5" drives and early versions of 2 TB 3.5” drives are just emergings. The result is that the effective cost per GB is being reduced by 50% or more with each step up in drive capacity.
• The power consumption for these larger SATA drives has remained constant or decreased slightly. However, they are 60% to 70% more efficient than typical 15K RPM Fibre Channel drives, which reduces both power and cooling costs.
• Highly efficient HP ProLiant blade servers use a multi–node chassis with shared power and share cooling for higher efficiency and reduced weight. ProLiant power supplies are sized to meet the exact needs, reclaiming lost data center power. Less oversubscription means more capacity opportunity. ProLiant systems can tell when power is being wasted and compensate for it. Sensors throughout the server allow intelligent actions to preserve, protect and enhance performance and power savings.

Deduplication Technology

Implementation of deduplication technology is also one of the most significant factors in improving the green impact on today’s IT environments.

By eliminating duplicated data, the amount of physical disk required to store the same amount of information can be reduced by 2x to 10x or more. This has an immediate impact not only on raw storage costs, but also by the reduction in power consumption and cooling requirements.

• Deduplication comes in many forms: in–line and post process are the most prevalent today. In–line is the most efficient approach, while post–process proves to be a less efficient method due to the incremental storage consumption required to cache data and additional processing cycles.
• Early deduplication deployments have been primarily used in backup–to–disk environments (known as Dedupe 1.0).
• Dedupe 2.0 is evolving as the next generation of applied deduplication, with implementations spreading across both primary and secondary storage, whether SAN, NAS, value tier, or archive. The resulting effect of Dedupe 2.0 is a broad reaching, ubiquitous implementation of deduplication across the entire IT environment, delivering storage reduction impact in every IT process.

Optimization

Primary storage Optimization also has a substantial impact on storage utilization:

• Migrating static (less active) data from primary storage contributes substantially to storage optimization. Typical static data ratios in enterprises range from 60% to 80% of primary storage according to industry analysts such as ESG, IDC and Taneja Group. If 60% of the data on primary storage can be migrated to a value tier (less costly to acquire and run, and leveraging deduplication) then the impact on IT efficiency (footprint, power, and cooling) will increase rapidly. In addition, processing performance will be positively affected by smaller, more agile primary data stores.

Permabit Solution:

Permabit implements each of the above technologies as an integral part of our green initiative:

Permabit uses 1 TB SATA drives that run at 7200 RPM. The combined performance and density increase delivers a one–two punch on green initiatives, providing higher storage density with significantly better power efficiency (typical SATA power consumption is 60%–70% less than 15K Fibre Channel drives on a per–GB basis).

Permabit delivers Dedupe 2.0, which combines more efficient in–line deduplication combined with compression to enable the best storage reduction. This saves storage initial costs and dramatically reduces footprint and power/cooling factors.

Permabit enables the migration of static data from primary storage to the most cost–effective value tier of storage. Value tier delivers high efficiency drive technology (as mentioned above) along with deduplication and compression that substantially reduces overall storage requirements. The result is less floor space and power/cooling because there is more data being stored in a much smaller data center footprint.

Permabit’s solution is delivered using the HP ProLiant SL6000 family of HP server solutions optimized for scale–out customers to greatly reduce costs, maximize power efficiency, by sharing power supplies and fans, and maintain total flexibility.