Reducing Data Center Energy Consumption and Carbon Emissions with Modern Tape Storage
Reducing the carbon emission is a global challenge. Companies has started to incorporate the carbon emission plans within their strategies and visions, announcing greener products. The Data Centers consumes more electricity, and only in US the total consumptions from the compute power is estimated to be 1.8% of the total electric consumptions in the country. Some countries has stoped using crypto-mining, as it uses too much of the country electricity consumptions. Other countries has difficulty to produce enough power for households and data centers, where they stop new plans for new data centers.
The global temperature has been a new challenge too, where data centers was forced to shutdown to save the compute-devices to become broken because of overheat.
Studies has chown that 19% of the data center consumptions comes from harddisk drives. At least 60% of the data stored on these volumes is never used.
Moving 10PB of storage from harddisk drives to tape storage, with a capacity trend of 35% increased storage per year, will reduce the carbon emission by 87%, and the TCO by 86%.
Greenpeace created a report in 2014 focusing on one of the biggest Data Centers based in Virgina. These Data Centers was predicted to consume 39,5Twh. This is roughly the same output as nine large coal powerplants of 500 – megawatt. However, Greenpeace only focus was to have renewable energy than trying to reduce the energy consumptions.
Data Storage Energy Consumption trend
As storage is one big consumer in the Data Centers, it can be good to see what can be achieved to reduce its power consumption as well as the carbon emission. The storage are typically based on HDD (hard disk drives) or SSD (Solid state drives). The power consumptions of Data Centers for only the US market is around 73 billion kWh. If this is provided by a utility using natural gas generation, than around 6.5 million tons of carbon dioxide will be created by storage.
Carbon emission reduction
Moving inactive unfrequently data used from harddisk drives or solid states drives, will not only reduce the TCO for the IT. It will also reduce the carbon oxide emissions. Spictera has technologies that simplifies this transmission using an universal storage solution, perfectly suitable for long term storage, archiving; as well as enhancing the data protection using continuous data protection.
Spictera’s main focus is to build climate smart energy efficient Green IT solutions, that not only reduces the energy consumptions; it can also be used to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions.
The solutions from Spictera also helps business to meet the requirements of data loss (RPO = Recovery Point Objective); by introducing continuous data protection, as well as how fast to restore data in case of an incident (RTO = Recovery Time Objective) using application consistent snapshot techniques in combination with progressive block level incremental forever (always incremental backup) and nearly instant restore techniques.
Our unified storage solution can mix almost anytype of media type (harddisk drives, solid state drives, worm media, compact disks : CD, Tape, cloud based media etc) over WAN (Wide Area Network; internet), LAN (Local Area Network), SAN (Storage Area Network) with replications to multi-sites. All of these are policybased and controlled centrally from one single pane of system.
The solutions from Spictera uses open API, so that it is easy to use, flexible, and reduces the educational spences for the business.
For example; using a file-system or a drive-letter accessible from a path on a Linux server is what almost everyone understand how to use.
Just mount the storage where ever you want it (# mount -t spfs /archive), and access the data (ls/cd/cp/mv…) using this mounted path (/archive). In Windows people might be more confurtable using “explorer”; which works perfectly fine too.
Is the data safe? Yes, as each copy stored on our solution is protected from changes. Changes of a file is equivalent to having a new version of the file, where each version of the file is centrally managed using policy controlling how many versions, the retentions (how long time to keep), which media to use, how many extra copies (replicated copies), etc.
Summary
Spictera can be used to reduce carbon dioxide, simplify data protection and storage, reduce TCO, enhancing data protections.