'Green' Storage Requires No Hardware

SAN FRANCISCO -- In addition to "Iraqi peace plan" or "Paris Hilton modesty" we can add the phrase "green storage" to today's list of oxymorons.

That was the upshot of a conference keynote this morning given by Jon Toigo, who weighed the merits of allegedly green storage options like consolidation, higher density disks, virtualization, thin provisioning, de-dupe, and MAID and found them all wanting. They've all just been repackaged by marketers anxious to demonstrate their eco-consciousness, said the CEO of Toigo Partners International.

"Green is this year's black, and vendors are fighting to say who has the greenest products of all," Toigo told the Storage Decisions audience this morning. "But we're going to fix the energy problem by throwing more hardware at it? That doesn't make sense."

Instead of exercising any spending power, the firebrand consultant urged storage buyers to adopt a green strategy built more around common sense and addressing root causes.

"What's needed is an organized program of data hygiene to detect and remove orphaned and contraband data on a routine basis," Toigo said. He then outlined these three aspects of an "intelligent data archiving" program:

Toigo cited a study undertaken by Sun CTO Randy Chalfant that examined exactly what was taking up all the space on the average disk drive. Chalfant found that, on average, 30 percent of the data was usable information and important to the business. Another 40 percent of the data was useful or required for compliance or historical reasons. Of the remainder, 15 percent was allocated but unused; 10 percent was orphaned data (defined as bytes where the user or server that created them no longer exists); and 5 percent was inappropriate or unauthorized content.

"Imagine what [reclaiming] 70 percent of extra space per disk could do for capex budget and power requirements. Green storage has to begin with green data. Fix that before you start throwing 'silver bullet' technology at it. All that's doing is selling more hardware."

Common sense also needs to factor into any SRM program, he added, noting that work processes need to be broken down into work flows, which means talking to users so that IT understands what's being stored and why."You'll be hearing more about a 'manager of managers' in storage, with policy engine controls that handle a managed repository archive that's searchable and index-able," Toigo said. "It's work, but at the end of the day, it solves the problem of the 40 percent of data on that platter that's gone to sleep."

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