Gaining Power Efficiency through Storage Optimisation

Over the past few years there has been a significant shift in the approach to storage management. Only a few years ago when data growth was relatively steady, and the cost of disk was falling unproportionately, businesses adopted a strategy of simply purchasing additional disk as their data storage requirements increased.

The growth of data storage requirements has been exponential over the past few years. In fact it is predicted that by 2011 data storage requirements will double every 12 hours. The cause of this points to the demand for a whole new range of business solutions that require high availability, high performance and watertight security, and this level of demand is only likely to increase.

To meet these business demands, many datacentres are now full to bursting, whilst consuming enormous amounts of energy and generating copious amounts of heat. Many organisations are now also encountering issues in drawing sufficient power from the national grid to supply their datacentres. This is unsurprising when you consider that a typical enterprise datacentre draws the same power as a 25,000 person town.

With such startling figures, it is no wonder that businesses now need to consider alternative datacentre architectures that can meet the increasing performance demands whilst reducing energy costs and consumption.

The majority of datacentres have considered the underlying server architecture, implementing technologies such as server consolidation and virtualisation, however from a storage perspective similar gains can be made from adopting virtualisation using SAN & NAS architectures.

Through the implementation of a strategic storage management solution, incorporating Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) technologies, businesses can classify and manage their data, enabling IT managers to gain control and manage their storage more efficiently.

These efficiencies can lead to significant energy consumption and cost savings.