The greening of the data centre

WESTERN DIGITAL is one of the latest members of the Green Grid. We swear that information breeds, and exponentially at that. WD offers another alternative to the mix, although we could hardly call it birth control for information. More like a creche.

Tom McDorman, WD's vice president and general manager of enterprise storage reckons, "WD's innovative Greenpower technology makes it possible for large scale data centres to increase storage capacity while minimising the increase in power consumption, and in many cases actually reduce power consumption."

Greenpower drives are averaging a power savings of 4-5 watts over currently available competitors' drives according to WD. The firm says the changing focus to low power drives is future-oriented and makes it a natural fit for a greening data centre. For a quick view of what this means to you they offer a power savings calculator. We're probably being optimistic but it might be a very useful tool to give you a feel for your choices during the purchasing cycle.

One of the hottest topics in greening your data centre is data de-duplication. You know, the copies, of the copies, of the copies that were backed up and again and again for that whole data safety thing? We did mention that whole thing about information breeding, right? Well, it makes a whole lot more sense to clean house, and in the process you often obtain serious efficiencies of operation and increase your data safety.

Data Domain, another one of the latest members of the Green Grid, is pretty clear that your efficencies depends upon your architecture and data types being stored.

In business for over four years, making it old in this industry, Data Domain does a variety of data storage methods that it reckons solve the problem associated with proliferation (did we say breed?) and the preservation of many versions and copies of data. This proliferation is one of the major areas of data growth that the IT department must store and nuture, whether it is used and useful data or not.

A short bit about deduplication for those whose tongues struggle to pronounce it fast enough. Deduplication is similar to data compression, but it looks for redundancy of very large sequences of bytes across very large comparison windows.

Obviously, reducing redundancy will bring efficiency gains. This is one of those "cheap to implement, fast timescale to implement" goals for your data centre. It's not like you need to build a new data center to achieve gains with deduplication.

Deduplication lowers storage costs since fewer disks are needed, and shortens backup/recovery times since there can be far less data to transfer.

Do you have tape back-ups? Time to deduplicate. Time to stop the idiots transferring the tapes from "loosing sensitive data"

Why do we love deduplication? It's a duh kind of thing. Call it birth control for your data.

For some good information to convince your boss take a gander at, click here. µ