chapter 4 Energy-efficient

data storage
3 Storage energy consumption
4 New thinking required
6 Storage options

Energy-efficient computing in the 21st century BY ALAN RADDING

chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
G
reen computing has
become a national pas-
sion that is spreading
globally. As a key ele-
ment of the IT infrastructure, storage
is expected to play its part by adopting
green storage practices.
The energy issue arises from what
Kenneth Brill, founder of the Uptime
Institute, a research firm based in Santa
Fe, N.M., refers to as “the economic
meltdown of Moore’s Law.” Moore’s Law
has given way to what Brill calls “the
invisible crisis in the data center,” result-
ing from the rapid increase in server and
storage density and its corresponding
demands for power and cooling (see
“Building a business case for data center
efficiency” in SearchDataCenter.com’s
e-book Energy-Efficient Computing in the
21st Century).
Storage trends have followed a corol-
lary of Moore’s Law. Storage vendors
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
have increased the density of bits stored
on a disk drive while reducing its cost on
a per-gigabyte basis. With demand for
storage skyrocketing—driven by the
incessant computerization of all busi-
ness processes and abetted by various
Previously hun-
regulations that require the retention dreds of giga-
of data, the importance of electronically bytes of storage
stored information in litigation, the were considered
growth of data-intensive applications, more than
and the adoption of new media-rich
applications—storage managers have
enough; today
steadily expanded their storage environ- organizations
ments. routinely main-
Previously hundreds of gigabytes of tain tens—or
storage were considered more than even hundreds—
enough; today organizations routinely
maintain tens—or even hundreds—of
of terabytes.
terabytes, or TB (where 1 TB = 1,000
GB) of storage, a full order of magnitude
more. Large enterprises are even start-
ing to count their storage in petabytes,
or PB (where 1 PB = 1,000 TB), which is
an order of magnitude beyond terabytes
(see ”How Much Data?” on page 3).
All of this storage, of course, requires
energy too.
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 2
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies

1. STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION

According to a recent report by Michael How Much Data?
Bell, research vice president at Stamford,
Conn.-based research firm Gartner Gigabyte (GB) = 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 230;
Inc., “Through 2009, energy costs will 20 GB holds the audio collection of the works
emerge as the second highest operating of Beethoven.
cost in 70% of worldwide data center
facilities.” Although Bell’s report focuses
Terabyte (TB) = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or 240;
on servers, storage poses its own energy
consumption concerns. “The bottom line
10 TB holds the printed collection of the U.S.
with storage,” he noted, “is that storage Library of Congress.
devices have a lot of mechanical compo-
nents that consume power too.” Petabyte (PB) = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, or 250
A typical data center splits its power 2 PB holds all the contents of U.S. academic
needs equally between powering the research libraries.
equipment and cooling. Of the amount
of power consumed by equipment, 48% Exabyte (EB) = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, or 260
is used by servers and 37% by storage. 5 EB holds all the words ever spoken by
Of the storage portion, 80% is used by human beings.
external storage arrays, with the rest
going to a tape library.
Zettabyte (ZB) = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes, or 270
Just how much energy does storage
consume? According to Greg Schulz, a
senior analyst at the StorageIO Group, Yottabyte (YB) = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes,
a consulting firm in Stillwater, Minn., or 280
a 300 GB, 15 K rpm (revolutions per
minute) Fibre Channel drive consumes SOURCE: JAMES S. HUGGINS (SEE WWW.JAMESSHUGGINS.COM)

• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION • NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 3

chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
21.04 watts; a 500 GB Serial Advanced
Technology Attachment (SATA) drive
running at 7,200 rpm uses 16.34 watts.
A 73 GB, 15 K Fibre Channel drive con-
sumes 15.2 watts, the least amount of
energy in the survey.
“You always have to balance energy
consumption and storage performance,”
said Schulz. At one end of the spectrum,
you could employ 100 TB of capacity
using 192 750 GB, 7,200 rpm SATA
drives in a single cabinet with a dual-
RAID controller. The annual energy
cost at a rate of $0.20/kilowatts per
hour (kWh) is $10,512. This is a high-
capacity but lower-performance system.
When performance is the goal, that
same array might instead be stocked
with 192 smaller, faster spinning drives.
A typical upper-end, high-performance
setup might use 146 GB drives spinning
at 15 K, for a total capacity of 28 TB. By
spreading this smaller amount of data
over multiple drives and spinning them
faster, many more reads and writes can
be accomplished in the same amount of
time as with a higher-capacity, slower
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
array. But this savings comes at a cost:
about $13,008 per year for power, or
about 24% in higher energy costs.
That penalty is likely to be increased
further by data protection measures.
Higher-performance arrays are often
Between 2009
used for higher-value data and conse- and 2012, the
quently require more robust data protec- cost of powering
tion schemes. an array over a
Our 100 TB array, for example, might three- to five-year
employ RAID 5. A 10-disk RAID set uses
10% of capacity for parity, thus reducing
life span will
our actual data store to 90 TB of usable exceed the cost
data. On the other hand, our 28 TB array of buying it.
of high-value data might be fully mir-
rored (that is, we create a full copy of
14 TB of data on half the array).
Comparing the energy cost per usable
TB, our 90 TB usable array will cost
$11,680 annually, while our 14 TB usable
array will run up a $26,016 tab for the
year, some 123% higher.
II. NEW THINKING REQUIRED
While the cost of storage on a cost-
per-gigabyte basis continues to drop,
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 4
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
storage managers often find their
best budgeting efforts undermined
by increasing energy costs. Sometime
between 2009 and 2012, depending on
the vagaries of your local utility, the cost
of powering an array over a three- to
five-year life span will exceed the cost
of buying it.
“Power and floor space are probably
our two biggest IT concerns right now,”
said Michael Thomas, special project
director at a major financial organization
in the Midwest with multiple data cen-
ters. As he waits for his company’s elec-
tric utility to come up with more power,
Thomas has had to delay some projects.
In short, he’s been forced to rethink his
approach to data center power.
“The ugly secret of smaller, faster,
cheaper is that just because we can
make it smaller and buy more of it
doesn’t mean it is any more energy effi-
cient,” said Bob Gill, chief research offi-
cer at TheInfoPro Inc., a New York-based
research firm. To date the focus has
been largely about server power con-
sumption, but storage devices also pose
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
energy consumption concerns. “Storage
actually can be a bigger power problem
than servers, because you have to keep
the disks spinning,” Gill added.
With Gartner projecting that the
average consumption of power doubling
to 6 kW per rack given the increased
density of IT equipment and the ratio of
power to cooling—which was previously
0.5:1 and has now reached 1:1 (1 watt of
Ways to Reduce
Storage Energy Consumption
» Switch to fewer higher-capacity disks.
» Use slower disks (7,200, 10,000 rpm).
» Increase disk utilization.
» Reduce data volume through de-duplication and compression.
» Move rarely accessed data to tape.
» Back up to tape, not disk.
» Virtualize and consolidate storage.
» Consider massive array of idle disks (MAID) for near-line
archiving.
SOURCE: STANLEY ZAFFOS, GARTNER INC.
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 5
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
cooling for each watt of power)—electri-
cal costs per rack will increase by a fac-
tor of four, calculated Bell. “The cost is
basically unsustainable,” he concluded.
So what is the energy-conscious stor-
age manager to do? Fortunately, there
are options, some of which amount to
just basic good storage practices that
companies didn’t bother to follow in
the old days when power was cheap
and plentiful. These options fall into
four broad categories that pose different
levels of risk: basic good practices,
smart configuration and management,
offline storage, and new technologies.
(For a summary, see “Ways to Reduce
Storage Energy Consumption” on
page 5.)
III. STORAGE OPTIONS
1. Good practices: Low risk. Good prac-
tices include implementing a data reten-
tion policy, boosting utilization through
consolidation and virtualization, and
reducing the amount of data to be stored
through compression and deduplication.
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
The first thing organizations need to
do is define and enforce a data retention
policy. Storage follows a simple equa-
tion: Less data equals less storage,
which means lower energy consump-
tion. Until recently, organizations would
“Our retention
store all their data because the steadily strategy can be
decreasing cost of storage made it easier summed up like
and cheaper to keep the data than to this: Preserve
create a retention policy and regularly data for the
purge unnecessary data. Today, however,
this practice no longer makes sense.
appropriate
Storing unneeded data is an utter waste amount of time …
of energy and storage resources. and not a
A data retention policy governs moment longer.”
when stored data can be eliminated. —ROBERT GERNRANDT,
“Our retention strategy,” said Robert SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER
OF LEGAL, TD BANK FINANCIAL
Gerbrandt, senior project manager of GROUP, TORONTO
legal at TD Bank Financial Group in
Toronto, “can be summed up like this:
Preserve data for the appropriate
amount of time. That means keeping
the right information in the right place
for the right amount of time and not a
moment longer.”
From an organizational standpoint,
that is easier said than done. It requires
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 6
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
managers to make decisions about their
data. Those organizations serious about
retention policies typically set up a
cross-functional working group to define
these policies. Such a group might
include members from compliance, HR,
legal, audit and business units.
After simply eliminating unnecessary
data, the next most effective option is to
boost storage utilization. Whether there
is little data on them or they are filled to
capacity, storage disks must generally be
kept spinning, which makes them a con-
stant energy drain. Whatever you can do
to decrease the amount of disk you need
to keep spinning will save energy. By
increasing utilization of the storage you
have—by filling more of the capacity on
each disk and array—you can delay the
need to add and spin more disk.
Direct-attached storage (DAS) often
runs at low levels of utilization, as little
as 10%. Networked storage utilization,
storage area network (SAN) or network-
attached storage, or NAS, may run at
20% or 30%. “You want to increase the
utilization of the spinning motors and
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
platters that you already have,” said
Jonathan Eunice, principal IT adviser at
research firm Illuminata Inc. in Nashua,
N.H. “You can use storage resource
management [SRM] to push utilization
up to 50%, 60%, even 70%.” Once the
Whatever
drive is spinning, additional utilization you can do to
essentially costs nothing from an energy decrease the
standpoint. SRM is software that lets amount of disk
you see how much of your storage you need to keep
capacity is being used and by which
applications or department.
spinning will
Sometimes consolidation requires save energy.
little more than a management decision
to prohibit different business units from
having their own SANs or DAS. Such
decisions, however, can obviously create
interdepartmental feuds among organi-
zational units, and a company’s storage
group needs strong support from senior
management to consolidate storage in
the face of business-unit resistance.
Storage virtualization is another strat-
egy for boosting utilization. Storage
virtualization—that is, putting a logical
layer in front of physical storage—isn’t
exactly new; file systems and RAID rep-
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 7
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
resent early examples of what would
now be understood as storage virtualiza-
tion. The more recent form of storage
virtualization known as thin provisioning
boosts storage utilization by fooling
applications into operating as though
they have more storage provisioned to
them than they need at that moment.
“Most users request more storage than
they actually need,” said Stanley Zaffos,
research vice president at Gartner,
“which is why thin provisioning works.”
If and when an application does need
all that actual physical capacity, a stor-
age manager has to pull some capacity
from other applications. For that reason,
most storage managers would not
increase utilization above 70%. They are
counting on some of the remaining 30%
as a cushion. But as soon as they antici-
pate having to dig into that cushion, it’s
time to order more physical disk. Until
then, consolidation, virtualization and
thin provisioning not only save energy
but also enable organizations to delay
buying additional physical storage
capacity.
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Data compression reduces the amount
of storage an organization needs, thus
minimizing the disk space required for a
given data set by half or more (depend-
ing on the kind of data). It does so by
encoding data stored on a disk in a way
Data compres-
that uses fewer bits, much like abbrevia- sion reduces
tions use fewer letters than the words the amount
they replace. of storage an
The drawback is performance: It takes organization
time to compress and decompress data,
which may become noticeable and bur-
needs, but the
densome as users try to access data drawback is
that’s compressed. performance.
Single-instance storage also reduces
the need for disk capacity. Organizations
typically store multiple copies of the
same data, such as email and attach-
ments. Companies may also distribute
replicas of certain data for performance
purposes. All of this eats up storage
capacity. Wherever an organization can
eliminate multiple copies, it can reduce
the amount of storage it needs, thereby
reducing the number of disks it has to
keep spinning as well as the time it
takes to back up the data that remains.
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 8
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
Deduplication technology automati-
cally identifies and removes duplicates
of stored data, enabling single-instance
storage automatically. Users don’t even
notice, because it leaves a pointer to
the single instance where the copy was
previously stored. As for drawbacks,
Dedupe can slow recovery processes.
Further, the amount of data reduction is
dependent on the kind of data. “Try it on
your own data before you buy,” advised
the StorageIO Group’s Schulz.
Numerous vendors, such as Kazeon
Systems Inc. and EMC Corp.’s Avamar
Technologies Inc., offer deduplication
technology. Increasingly companies
will find deduplication built into tape
libraries and storage arrays. “Companies
shouldn’t even buy a VTL [virtual tape
library] without dedupe built in,” ad-
vised Arun Taneja, principal analyst at
Hopkinton, Mass.-based Taneja Group.
2. Configuration and deployment
tricks: Normal risk. These strategies
revolve around the deployment of disk
drives of various sizes and speed to
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
achieve the right balance of performance
and energy efficiency. The kind of stor-
age you deploy and how you do so can
lower energy consumption.
But first a company has to decide
which applications need high perform-
A 1 TB drive
ance. If an application doesn’t need high is more energy
performance, a company can deploy efficient than four
slow 7,200/7,500 rpm disks rather than 250 GB drives,
10 K rpm or 15 K rpm. Slower speeds because only one
use less energy. Similarly, smaller form-
factor disk drives of 2.5 inches require
spindle is turning
only 5 volts, compared with 12 volts for to get the same
standard 3.5-inch form-factor drives. capacity.
The small form-factor drives, however,
usually have smaller capacity, which
means you need more of them to get
the same capacity.
On the other hand, as long as utiliza-
tion is high, larger-capacity hard drives
reduce energy. A 1 TB drive, for example,
is more energy efficient than four 250
GB drives, because “you have only one
spindle turning to get the same capa-
city,” said Stephen Foskett, former direc-
tor of strategy services at Framingham,
Mass.-based GlassHouse Technologies
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 9
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies

Inc. In the event of a drive failure, how-
ever, RAID arrays take much longer to
rebuild large-capacity disk drives.
Storage managers can develop storage
tiers to separate high-performance stor-
age from everything else. Only a few
applications need truly high perform-
ance. By maintaining a small tier of high-
performance storage for these applica-
tions and directing everything else to
lower-performance storage, a company
can reduce energy consumption and
costly high-performance storage pur-
chases (see “Leveraging Tiered Storage
and New Devices” below).
Ultimately storage managers have to

Leveraging Tiered Storage and New Devices

TIER 0 TIER 1 (PRIMARY) TIER 2 OR 3

Category I/O intensive High performance Storage-centric

Drive type Multiple solid-state disks 192 x 146 GB 4 GFC 192 x 1 TB SATA
Drive speed RAM memory 15.5K rpm 7,200 rpm
Footprint 1 cabinet 1 cabinet 1 cabinet
Capacity 1 TB 28 TB 192 TB
Annual kWh 39,420 72,270 72,270
Average kWh 3 5.5 5.5
CO2 emission 26.43 tons 48.46 tons 48.46 tons
SOURCE: GREG SCHULZ, THE STORAGEIO GROUP, 2007

• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION • NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 10

chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies

balance several factors: the number of is almost eight times that of a tape
disks (i.e., spindles to spin), disk speed, library,” McAdam wrote. Of course, this
and the capacity and energy efficiency means giving up the fast random access
of the disks. In general, of course, newer
drives and controllers are more energy
efficient. The challenge is to determine
the right number of spindles to achieve Painful Energy Tradeoffs
the level of performance and capacity in
TRADEOFF IMPLICATIONS
the most energy-efficient way. But there
are always tradeoffs (see “Painful Energy
Tradeoffs” at right). Energy efficiency More spindles boost performance,
vs. performance but they also use more energy.
3. Going offline: Normal risk. If spinning
disk is the major culprit in storage ener- Density vs. Cooling efficiency requires less density,
gy consumption, a clear solution is not cooling efficiency but it wastes rack and floor space.
to spin disk. Not only does tape cost less
than disk, but it uses less energy and High vs. low Faster disks increase performance,
cooling; once tape finishes recording the disk speed but they also burn more energy.
data, no components move. In her 2006
report “Tape and Disk—What It Really
Costs to Power the Devices,” Dianne
Online vs. offline Online data provides higher per-
McAdam, former director of enterprise (i.e., tape-based) formance, but it also burns more
information assurance at the Clipper data energy.
Group Inc. in Wellesley, Mass., analyzed
SATA disk and linear tape-open (LTO) Energy vs. Small form-factor disks use less energy,
storage technologies. “The cost to capacity but they require more spindles to
acquire, power and cool a disk system achieve high capacity.

• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION • NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 11

chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
of disk. But how much data residing on
disk actually needs fast, online access?
After a few weeks or months, much
stored data is never accessed again.
“Storing infrequently accessed data
on disk is equivalent to keeping your car
running constantly in the driveway,”
McAdam wrote. The car is always ready
to go if you need to drive anywhere and
saves you several minutes of warm-up
time.” But keeping a car running just in
case is a ridiculously expensive proposi-
tion. In the same way, it makes equally
little sense to keep infrequently used
data spinning on disk just because you
might need it someday. Yet for many
organizations, that is precisely the case:
Data that hasn’t been accessed for
weeks, months, even years sits on
spinning disk drives burning up energy.
Further, constantly spinning disk drives
waste more than energy; they are also
uneconomical. McAdam calculated the
cost over a five-year period of storing
125 TB of infrequently accessed data with
a projected growth of 30% a year. Using
an 85% utilization rate for tape and a 70%
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
utilization rate for disk, McAdam con-
cluded that by the end of the first year, a
company’s IT department would need to
purchase 232 TB of disk storage (at 70%
utilization), or 191 TB of tape storage (at
85% utilization), to store the original 125
After a few weeks
TB of data, plus the additional 37.5 TB of or months, much
new data. By the end of the fifth year, IT stored data is
would need a total of 663 TB of disk never accessed
storage, or 545 TB of tape storage, to again.
accommodate the original data and the
30% of new data being produced each
year. Over this period of time, the cost
for the tape library, drives and cartridges
equals $261,042, while the cost of disk
storage (with 15 controllers, 105 expan-
sion units and nine racks) is $1.7 million.
When McAdam figured in the cost
of energy, the picture for disk got worse.
Powering the tape library and four tape
drives (at 1.6 kWh per unit) will cost
$4,238 a year. The cost of powering 15
disk controllers and 15 expansion frames
(at 33 kWh per unit) will cost $109,745
per year for power. (But if you were to
calculate the overall energy footprint
of tape versus disk by considering the
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 12
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
energy consumption of their respective
manufacturing processes, the degree of
advantage could shift.)
The lesson is clear: To lower storage
costs and reduce storage energy con-
sumption, move infrequently accessed
data to tape. The approach has draw-
backs, of course. Should any of this data
be needed, for example, an organization
has to retrieve it from tape. And that
retrieval takes time and effort.
The tape option presents other chal-
lenges. Companies need to identify
data that is unlikely to be accessed fre-
quently. They also need an effective sys-
tem for indexing and managing tape so
they can track down data efficiently.
Tape handling itself is labor intensive,
and tapes need to be properly ware-
housed. Still, if the goal is energy conser-
vation, tape should play a role.
4. New technologies: High risk. Given
companies’ increasing emphasis on
going green, any new storage technology
will likely be more energy efficient than
its predecessor. And new technologies
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
like massive array of idle disks (MAID)
and solid-state disk (SSD) can change
the storage energy equation—possibly
quite dramatically in the case of SSD.
Data archiving solutions use slow,
energy-efficient online disks, but they
The lesson is
must still be kept spinning for months, clear: To lower
years or even decades while the data lies storage costs and
dormant. MAID changes the archiving reduce storage
energy equation. Archiving system ven- energy consump-
dors like Copan Systems Inc. now offer
MAID systems, which shut down the
tion, move infre-
spindles for infrequently accessed data. quently accessed
Positioning MAID as a way to extend the data to tape.
useful life of spinning disk and thus low-
ering the cost of disk arrays, Copan has
touted MAID’s energy efficiency as five
times more energy efficient per TB than
conventional disk arrays for archival
storage.
“MAID systems like Copan could
deliver interesting energy savings,” said
McAdam. But “whenever you power
down disks, there are potential problems
bringing back individual drives,” she
warned. Some data may not come back.
To avoid this problem, MAID vendors
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 13
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
automatically power up each idle drive
periodically to check for data errors and
rebuild the drive using RAID parity algo-
rithms if necessary.
SSD are devices that store data in
arrays of chips rather than spinning disk.
Apple’s iPod nano and USB flash drives
are common uses of SSD. SSD provides
stunningly fast performance with negli-
gible energy consumption. But the trade-
off is extraordinarily high cost per giga-
byte. Thus while SSD reduces storage
energy consumption, it isn’t going to
save money, at least not in the short
term.
The primary forms of SSD today are
various types of dynamic RAM (DRAM)
and NAND flash storage. (NAND is an
electrical label describing a circuit’s
Boolean logic function as “not and,” or
NAND.) The main advantages of flash
storage are extremely high performance,
reliability, low power consumption and
small size. “Flash-drive performance is
1,000 times better than hard disk,”
noted Krishna Chander, a senior analyst
at iSuppli Corp., a research firm in Santa
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Clara, Calif. “Figuring the hard drive,
actuator, motor latency and access time,
you’re looking at 4 to 10 milliseconds at
best. With flash, you’re talking about 50
microns.” Though it’s not currently used
for enterprise storage, NOR flash (which
The main
identifies a circuit’s Boolean logic func- advantages of
tion as “not or,” or NOR) is another flash flash storage
SSD option. include extremely
DRAM-based SSD systems are even high performance
faster, though also more expensive.
DRAM-based systems, like those from
and low power
Texas Memory Systems, deliver better consumption.
performance than flash SSD. But they
are volatile and need battery backup,
which adds to the cost and complexity
of the system.
The SSD market is rapidly evolving
into an alphabet soup of acronyms as
companies try to find the best non-
volatile storage technology. In addition
to DRAM- and flash-based SSD, compa-
nies are exploring various alternatives—
ferroelectric memory, magnetic memory,
phase-change memory, polymer memo-
ry, nanotechnology memory, resistivity-
change memory, micromechanical probe
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 14
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
memory, onetime programmable read-
only memory—that can deliver the high
performance of SSD and the low cost of
conventional magnetic disk drives with-
out the drawback of flash (such as a lim-
itation on the number of writes due to
cell wear-out).
Given its high cost, SSD is not yet a
mainstream storage option. It is used
mainly as storage cache to boost I/O
performance as measured in I/O per
second (IOPS). It is used as a new tier—
tier 0—between primary hard disk and
system cache.
But as Moore’s Law works its magic,
as scale efficiencies kick in and as per-
formance cost as measured by IOPS
trumps cost per gigabyte, observers
expect SSD to emerge as a serious stor-
age alternative. “Hard disk is not keeping
up with the performance of the server,”
said Alan Fitzgerald, the chief technolo-
gy officer at Phoenix-based Adtron
Corp., an SSD manufacturer. Since
servers can consume stored data faster
than hard disks can provide it, compa-
nies are compelled to add more disks
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
simply to boost performance. They may
not need additional disk capacity, but
additional spindles increase the through-
put of the system. As a result, “Compa-
nies end up buying more hard drives
just to get the same level of IOPS as
Ultimately
one SSD, and those drives require more solid-state disk
space, power and cooling,” said Jeff may provide the
Janukowicz, a research manager for solution to the
solid-state disk at Framingham, Mass.- storage energy
based research firm IDC.
STEC, an SSD system vendor based in
dilemma, but that
Santa Ana, Calif., compared hard drives scenario is still
and SSD in a high-IOPS application. It years away.
found that a company would need 450
73 GB disk drives to generate the same
level of IOPS as 15 146 GB SSD drives.
Once you consider the cost of multiple
enclosures, racks, cables, transceivers,
controllers, and SAN switches necessary
to house and connect all these hard
drives, the price is almost $413,000,
according to STEC. The total SDD cost,
which requires only one enclosure, rack,
cable, transceiver, controller and switch,
comes to about $201,000. And these
calculations don’t even begin to factor in
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 15
chapter 4 Energy-efficient storage technologies
energy consumption, which overwhelm-
ingly favors the SSD option.
Ultimately SSD may offer the solution
to the storage energy dilemma, enabling
companies to get fast, reliable storage
with minimum energy consumption and
at a price-to-performance ratio they can
live with. But that scenario is still years
away. More likely, SSD will evolve as tier
0, providing another option in the overall
storage mix, as storage managers try to
balance performance, capacity, cost and
energy consumption.
Storage managers also have a hybrid
storage option, which combines flash
and disk drives. The first devices add
256 MB of flash to a conventional disk
drive. “The flash sits between the sys-
tem’s RAM and hard drive,” explained
Josh Tinker, market development man-
ager at Seagate Technology LLC in Scotts
Valley, Calif.
Having 256 MB of nonvolatile memory
enables a drive manufacturer to reduce
energy consumption and increase relia-
bility. It can stop spinning the disk for
periods of time and rely completely on
• STORAGE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
the flash portion, which saves energy
and reduces wear and tear on the drive.
But according to Tinker, the benefits
of hybrid storage will remain minimal
until Microsoft Vista enters the picture.
“Vista has SuperFetch, which manages
The benefits of
the memory architecture to take advan- hybrid storage
tage of the flash,” he said. At this point, will be minimal
however, the hybrid drive is a Windows until Microsoft
Vista-only play that will surface in Vista enters
high-end laptops, where conserving
battery is a concern. But it signals the
the picture.
potential of combining SSD and hard-
disk storage.
In the meantime, storage managers
should implement some, if not all, of the
energy-saving storage practices identi-
fied here. These practices enable man-
agers to reduce storage energy footprint
by reducing the number of constantly
spinning disks. And once solid-state disk
becomes practical, companies can reap
the benefits of reducing or at least slow-
ing their storage capacity needs.
Alan Radding is a freelance technology writer
based in Newton, Mass.
• NEW THINKING REQUIRED • STORAGE OPTIONS 16