Keeping IT 'Green' This Summer

I like summer. Its a time to do some fishing – including outings with some IT people who prefer being on the water over being on green golf courses. When not relaxing and enjoying the warm weather, summer is also a good time to review technology strategies and reflect on trends and industry initiatives.

One such initiative that is getting attention reminiscent of the run-up to Y2K is the “greening” of IT. The supplier blitz ranges from holistic awareness campaigns encompassing technologies, best practices, asset disposal, energy consumption, corporate citizenship, or assessment services, to specific articles, white papers, and blogs about how to “cash in" on the “greening” of IT.

It's more like a “greenwash” of IT in a color to match the U.S. currency.

Don’t get me wrong. Real green initiatives are valid, and I’m a fan of green stories that address data and storage management effectiveness as well as real efficiency – as opposed to virtual efficiency in which the storage and data problem is simply moved elsewhere.

Real green stories involve optimizing data center cooling and air flow and leveraging advisory services from vendors like Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), among others. There are also improvements that can be made by reducing data footprint as well as replacing older, less performance-efficient and power-hungry IT equipment.Server vendors are doing a good job of addressing cooling and power consumption while increasing the performance of chips and servers. However, storage vendors have focused more on management tools and storage capacity per given footprint or unit of power consumed, as opposed to activity metrics, including IOPs (input/output operations per second) or bandwidth per watt.

For example, many storage vendors are playing the “33 percent” game, talking about how their solutions can reduce or improve your energy consumption by 33 percent. These vendors are simply telling the story that going from a 500-Gbyte to a 750-Gbyte disk drive addresses power and cooling by 33 percent, which is the amount of capacity improvement of the drives.

As good as it sounds, the 33 percent power improvement story does not address I/O and application performance. Indeed, blindly shifting from lower-capacity to higher-capacity disk drives to reduce the number of disks that you need to power can degrade your applications, contributing to a growing server-to-storage I/O performance and capacity gap.

I give marketeers an “atta boy” or “atta girl” for being smart enough to leverage a decades-old theme of increasing the capacity in the same footprint without addressing performance. But I also give IT storage buyers credit for being smart enough to see through these old stories and ask about actual performance improvements. — Greg Schulz, Founder and Senior Analyst, The StorageIO Group

Playing the larger capacity disk drive game can be viable for storage capacity-centric applications and environments where you may be evaluating storage on a dollar per terabyte per watt basis -- or perhaps even factoring in floor space.For environments that need to support a given level of performance and user response time to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and other objectives, a balanced approach requires also looking at improving your power consumption from a IOPs per watt perspective.

This means that in a given footprint, you reduce response time and increase performance without increasing your power consumption or requiring more hardware to increase your applications performance. In other words, you do more with what you already have.

For on-line and primary storage, for example, instead of evaluating and comparing storage on an idle or static basis, look at how many IOPs per watt can be achieved -- or look at IOPs per watt per given configuration.

Tiered storage plays a role in this kind of approach. Tiered access, tiered data protection, and tiered disk drive types can be set up to address power and cooling. The trick is to strike a balance between performance, availability, capacity, and energy consumption (PACE) for your applications across different tiers of storage.

But simply tiering storage is not the total solution; instead, additional techniques, including data and storage management to address data footprint reduction, are required for optimal PACE. Here's where technologies such as archiving, compression, compaction, and single instance storage (SIS) (also known as de-duplication) come into the picture.Over time, we can expect to see more solutions that offer real PACE benefits. In the meantime, it's helpful to recall a few basic tips to keep your IT infrastructure cool and safe:

With that, its time to take a short break and go fishing before the next storm rolls in -- whether from another heat wave or more hot air from “greenwash” stories, some of which contain more methane then a crowded cow pasture. Stay cool and drink plenty of fluids, but go easy on that “green” cool-aid and “green” Jell-O. You may wake up the next morning feeling like your head needs to be de-duplicated and un-compressed.

And if you're stranded on shore or off the golf course, feel free to click here for further summer reading.

— Greg Schulz, Founder and Senior Analyst, The StorageIO Group