The total amount spent worldwide on powering and cooling spinning disks used in external enterprise storage exceeded US$1bn in 2007, analyst firm IDC has claimed.
The total amount spent worldwide on powering and cooling spinning disks used in external enterprise storage exceeded US$1bn in 2007, analyst firm IDC has claimed.
IDC estimates that the storage industry will ship nearly eight times the amount of spinning disks between 2008 and 2012 than it did in the previous 11 years.
Apart from the cost of acquiring these disks is the cost to power and cool them. IDC calculated that based on an aggregate worldwide electricity cost of US$0.07 per kilowatt-hour in 2007, the cost to power and cool these drives was more than US$1bn in 2007 and will only go up.
“As companies continue to add storage capacity at an aggregate rate of over 50pc per year, the number of spinning disks continues to be a larger part of the overall power and cooling costs within a data centre,” said David Reinsel, group vice-president for IDC storage and semiconductors research.
“Vendors must do more to promote and enable well-rounded green storage strategies which include data centre redesign, data consolidation and data reduction.”
Options for companies who wish to become ‘greener’ in their use of enterprise storage are to utilise strategies such as ‘thin provisioning’ (which allows space to be easily allocated to servers on a just-enough and just-in-time basis), reducing data duplication and low-power operations.
By Niall Byrne
