My guess is that today’s gaggle of green events, speeches and articles will focus on inspiring each of us to raise our environmental consciousness by rethinking the way we use energy.  No question, a noble and necessary exercise. 

However, one topic that I’m afraid may not receive its fair share of MSM attention is the rapidly growing problem of data center power consumption. 

Here’s the issue.  According to a recent report (http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/EPA_Datacenter_Report_Congress_Final1.pdf), servers and data centers account for about 1.5 percent of all U.S. energy consumption, or 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh).  This is more than the electricity consumed by the nation’s color televisions in a year, and about as much energy used to power 5.8 million average U.S. households.  And, at the rate our digital information requirements are growing, server/data center energy consumption will nearly double to 100 kWh by 2011, which represents about $7.4 billion in annual electricity costs. 

So what can we do to move rapidly to greener data centers?  The worst offending part of the system, the misuse of HDDs, should be among the first to be dealt with.  The fact is that many IT managers are using 3 to 4 times more HDDs than they need from a capacity perspective just to meet growing I/O performance requirements.  This “over provisioning” does not only fail to meet I/O performance needs as I noted in earlier posts, but it’s probably one of the most inefficient uses of IT technology I’ve ever seen.  Talk about a waste of space and power (not to mention money)!

With data centers under constant pressure to operate more efficiently and reduce costs, this type of waste is ridiculous, especially when there are other viable alternatives available.  One technology that deserves serious attention is the Enterprise Flash Drive, which is based on solid state technology to offer extremely high data I/O performance. 

Here’s an example of the benefits of deploying EFDs in the enterprise, without breaking the bank.  A hybrid solution combining existing hard drives (preserving some of the initial investment) with selectively deployed EFDs can greatly enhance I/O performance while eliminating the need for HDD over-provisioning.  Best of all, this type of approach can slash data center energy consumption – up to 80 percent in some cases.

Let’s face it, enterprise data centers will continue to push the envelope in terms of performance and capacity requirements.  The trick is finding ways to meet these demands in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible, and EFDs can be a great option for many organizations.

Amyl Ahola 

The dramatic reductions in HDD cost per GB have resulted in many system/storage architects (and application/operating system programmers) treating primary storage as though it is free.

Some of the results are:

• Exponential increases in the size of operating systems and applications
• Mass deployment of low-end and midrange servers with multiple copies of data (and applications)
• Over-provisioning of storage to satisfy future needs projections (which also likely adopt the concept of free storage)
• Adoption of power-hungry DRAM cache appliances to mask HDD performance shortfalls
• Over-provisioning of HDDs to mask HDD performance shortfalls

These all result in inefficient use of storage that has many costs, not the least of which is the increasing cost of energy consumption.  Some of the energy data becoming available paints a sobering picture:

• Data centers account for 1.5% of ALL U.S. electrical consumption, and this is expected to double in a few years
• Power consumption per $1,000 of server spending has increased by a factor of 4 since 2000
• Power failure and availability is expected to halt data center operations at more than 90% of all companies over the next few years
• Fifty percent of current data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity this year

HDDs are clearly not the only contributor to the rapid acceleration of data center power consumption, but their inefficient use is likely one of the largest contributors.  Data that suggests more than one third of data center power consumption is storage related.

Trends and techniques such as consolidation, virtualization and thin provisioning should all contribute to improved efficiencies.  But while doing so, these approaches will put increased performance demands on the HDDs.  The result:  an increased need for higher performance (i.e., higher RPM……read that as ‘power consuming’) drives and even further over-provisioning for performance – and therefore once again increased energy consumption.

It’s time for new metrics to be considered in the data centers, which take into account energy usage to aid the system designers as they optimize their systems.  Several metrics are identified at the www.greendatastorage.com website; examples cited include activity per watt, such as transactions/Watt, IOPs/Watt, and bandwidth/Watt.

I believe that Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) will play a major role in reversing these trends. EFDs can provide over 1000x improvement in IOPs/Watt, and an order of magnitude or more improvement in bandwidth/Watt over the highest performing HDD’s.

Amyl Ahola