Dispatches from OpenWorld: Growing a Green Data Center
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA 
on 11.13.07
This is the fourth post in TreeHugger's coverage of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Click here for the other entries, and stay tuned for more!
Data centers and mega-storage isn’t always considered a very sexy “green” implementation, but as the digital world continues to grow and grow, is really on the tip of the tongues at many substantial IT departments. Scaling up often requires more and more real estate, cooling capacity, and money, but it doesn’t have to, according to Compellent Technologies.
They’ve deployed their Storage Center SAN (that’s Storage Area Network) that utilizes technologies like Automated Tiered Storage, Thin Provisioning and Advanced Virtualization, they’ve been able to save companies up to 93 percent of power consumption and power costs compared to more traditional storage solutions. While the details may not be very interesting to any who isn’t a data storage professional, the numbers are significant: the typical storage system consumers 52,740 killowatt hours over five years; Compellent’s SAN consumes 3,758 over the same period. That’s a lot.
We won’t delve too deeply into the tech details here (you can learn all you want to know and more from Compellent’s website), it’s worth mentioning that when Compellent recently upgraded their headquarters in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, they were able to effectively double the size of its headquarters while simultaneously reducing their carbon footprint. There are lots of numbers attached to this: 90% of post-industrial waste was diverted from landfills and recycled; 55% of the building materials came from recycled products; the steel frame of the building is 90% recycled; and the building saves 240,000 gallons per year with waterless urinals, motion-activated faucets and low-flush toilets.
It’s also worth mentioning that while Compellent considers itself a “green” company because of its ability to reduce energy use and carbon footprint, but developed their SAN and green building because they were smart, did the math, and realized that it could save mega-bucks while saving resources and energy. They did a little homework, realized that “green” just makes sense for technology and building, and implemented them, and now they’re able to offer dramatic savings, both for their customers and the environment.
TreeHugger doesn’t necessarily care how folks decide to go green, as long as they do it right, follow through, and pass it along to their constituents; Compellent has been able to do so, and we’re happy to see it. ::Compellent Technologies and ::OpenWorld
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One of the challenges with storage systems is gauging power consumption, for example, system "A" can use less power than system "B", however is system "A" delivering the same level of performance (is it as fast), amount of capacity or space to store data (how useful). Consequently, you can have a storage system that uses less power, however if its performance is also less than a competing product, you may actually need multiple copies of a lower power consuming storage system to deliver a given level of performance.
That is if performance is a concern and if performance is not a concern, then you should be looking at low power consuming devices including large capacity fat disk drives available from almost every storage vendor or use removable media including removable hard disk drives (RHDD), magnetic tape or optical. However if performance is a concern, look at more than just power savings, look at how much work can be done per unit of energy consumed to maximize your energy efficiency.
For example, when you need to use a car or other form of transportation, MPG city or highway as well as how many people can be transported per mile per unit of fuel becomes important. Consequently storage metrics are evolving to be able to compare storage systems not just on energy savings, however more importantly on energy efficiency and effectiveness to get a given amount of work done.
If you are really serious about addressing energy efficiency, energy savings, or maximizing energy usage to do more work with the same or less power (energy effectiveness) take a look at some of the different vendors that are working on and delivering solutions including Brocade (more performance per port per unit of energy), IBM (Big green initiative), HP (power and cooling assessments), HGST (intelligent power management balancing performance and power savings), Nexsan (MAID and intelligent power management), EMC (tiered storage), Imation and Prostor (Removable disk drives), TMS (FLASH and SSD storage), Copan (MAID), NEC (MAID), LSI (boost performance and use less power), Fujitsu (MAID), Datadomain (data footprint reduction), Seagate (energy efficiency disk drives), Storwize (inline compression and data footprint reduction) and many many others.
Whether you are looking to save costs, save the planet, or support continued growth, learn more about power, cooling, floor space, energy, environmental and green related topics for storage, servers and data infrastructure topics including free tutorials, webcasts, articles, tips and other information at www.greendatastorage.com.
GS
One of the challenges with storage systems is gauging power consumption, for example, system "A" can use less power than system "B", however is system "A" delivering the same level of performance (is it as fast), amount of capacity or space to store data (how useful). Consequently, you can have a storage system that uses less power, however if its performance is also less than a competing product, you may actually need multiple copies of a lower power consuming storage system to deliver a given level of performance.
That is if performance is a concern and if performance is not a concern, then you should be looking at low power consuming devices including large capacity fat disk drives available from almost every storage vendor or use removable media including removable hard disk drives (RHDD), magnetic tape or optical. However if performance is a concern, look at more than just power savings, look at how much work can be done per unit of energy consumed to maximize your energy efficiency.
For example, when you need to use a car or other form of transportation, MPG city or highway as well as how many people can be transported per mile per unit of fuel becomes important. Consequently storage metrics are evolving to be able to compare storage systems not just on energy savings, however more importantly on energy efficiency and effectiveness to get a given amount of work done.
If you are really serious about addressing energy efficiency, energy savings, or maximizing energy usage to do more work with the same or less power (energy effectiveness) take a look at some of the different vendors that are working on and delivering solutions including Brocade (more performance per port per unit of energy), IBM (Big green initiative), HP (power and cooling assessments), HGST (intelligent power management balancing performance and power savings), Nexsan (MAID and intelligent power management), EMC (tiered storage), Imation and Prostor (Removable disk drives), TMS (FLASH and SSD storage), Copan (MAID), NEC (MAID), LSI (boost performance and use less power), Fujitsu (MAID), Datadomain (data footprint reduction), Seagate (energy efficiency disk drives), Storwize (inline compression and data footprint reduction) and many many others.
Whether you are looking to save costs, save the planet, or support continued growth, learn more about power, cooling, floor space, energy, environmental and green related topics for storage, servers and data infrastructure topics including free tutorials, webcasts, articles, tips and other information at www.greendatastorage.com.
GS