Green Storage

Since we can look at the aspect of virtualization of desktops and even severs. How can we further reduce the energy consumption of the storage devices on the systems? Normally these storage devices especially hard disks even when idle consume some energy. According to an article in SearchSMBStorage businesses energy is consumed 30% of the time by storage and up to 80% of that storage power is consumed by spinning hard disks, both idle and running.

I have done a little research in which ways Limkokwing, if they take upon virtual computing, can further lower costs with an approach to green storage on the servers and machines that they would run.

When running on servers certain information may be obsolete or may be not necessary for access at that particular moment. During this time the storage devices will be running, as they are active waiting for a command to summon up the information. However this on the long run will inflict huge cots as hard disk are running for no apparent reason when data is not being used. What they could implement is to use certain types of software that management can manage how long information can be held active before it should be archived into separate forms of storage until it is needed. This is a form of Massive Arrays of Idle Hard Disks or MAID. It used to be a very slow process when information had to be summoned as the hard disks were switched off but companies such as Nexsan Technologies have taken a stand in not fully turning the hard disks off but by giving the shortage devices a level of spin-down. This change helps reduce power consumption by 20% at level 1, 60% at level 3 and at the same time boost response time of acquiring information in less that 30s when off.

One good but a little more expensive solution is to move to Solid State Drives. Computer World States ‘Solid-state disk (SSD) drives are all the rage among techies. The drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory, meaning there are no moving parts. Because there is no actuator arm and read/write head that must seek out data on a platter like on a hard disk drive (HDD), they are faster in reading and, in most cases, writing data.’

This already as it is means there is a considerable drop in power consumption not to mention a huge increase in performance as information can be accessed at a quicker rate as read and write rates of SSD’s are considerably fast at 230 MBpS.

Normal hard disks use about 18W of power and in huge servers, which may contain 128 HDs which in total would consume alone 2304W of power while normal SSDs would only consume about 2W of power that would total 256W of power. This is a significant difference that would lower power consumption costs but would be a problem as the cost per gigabyte is high.