Mike Walters, consulting systems engineer, NetApp says that his company has found a way to save power and money

IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Forecast 2006–2010 predicts that worldwide data will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 50.6 per cent through the decade. Continuous improvements in price-performance and £/GB have made it both easy and affordable to solve storage concerns by simply adding more disks to existing storage systems. However, IT executives are discovering that there are limits to that easy growth: floor space, weight loads, rack space, network drops, power connections, cooling infrastructure and even power itself are finite resources.

Cooling is inextricably linked to power consumption. Every watt of power that enters the data centre generates heat that must be removed from the environment and to do so takes more power. The cost of power to cool a system is often as much as powering the system itself. But cost is not the only issue. In some cases, rack densities generate more heat than existing cooling infrastructures can handle. Where there is no room for additional cooling infrastructure, there is no room for growth.

Storage companies have been steadily increasing storage density, inadvertently driving up data centre power demands and cooling concerns. Without deliberate action, high-energy costs will cripple an IT department’s ability to grow and change in support of the demands of the business.

Environmental issues are gaining serious commercial momentum and fuelled by the growing number of local and global green initiatives, they are rising ever more insistently up the corporate agenda. More power-efficient storage solutions provide for business growth while saving power. Every watt of energy saved in the data centre is a watt that is removed from an organisation’s carbon footprint and the global warming equation.

In a 2007 survey of NetApp customers, 59 per cent indicated a serious focus on addressing power consumption with 46 per cent already making investments. Today, customers can take advantage of NetApp technology to subtract machines and disks, reduce the overall data centre footprint and maximise storage utilisation. This approach not only helps IT organisations achieve greater power efficiency but also lowers infrastructure complexity and costs while enabling customers to better respond to new business demands.

The NetApp approach to fighting rapidly growing power consumption is simple: subtract machines and disks from the power equation by using storage more efficiently. This strategy has benefits including: lowering complexity, lowering staff costs, lowering support and service costs and improving network efficiency and performance. The NetApp strategy for reducing storage power consumption makes use of today’s technology to halt power growth at its source.

The smarter way to address the power and cooling crisis today is to more intelligently store data on less disk storage, which minimises the kW consumption for each GB of data. Through unique software and hardware offerings, NetApp products minimise the physical disk storage requirements by optimising storage utilisation.
 
NetApp IT case study

NetApp has experienced rapid, sustained growth in recent years at a rate of 30 per cent annually. To simply add more disks to installed storage systems was not a viable long-term solution.

NetApp IT realised significant improvements and solved its utilisation and power challenges by consolidating data on 10 of the latest storage systems running Data ONTAP 7G. NetApp FlexVol technology increased operation flexibility by making it much easier to add new volumes or grow or shrink existing volumes to meet changing business demands. This flexibility also lowered costs with increased storage utilisation from less than 40 per cent to an average of 60 per cent.

As a result, NetApp cut its storage footprint from 25 to six racks and eliminated 94 tonnes of air conditioning, reducing electricity costs by almost £120,000 a year. In addition, NetApp IT realised huge business benefits of reduced complexity through simplified management, reduced risk of data unavailability and increased flexibility to respond to future IT needs.

Following these steps will return enough power and headroom for growth to a data centre to protect the ability of storage infrastructure to support the demands of businesses for many years to come. Just as today there is no single solution for reducing storage power consumption, future reductions will be attained through a combination of efforts and by attacking the issue on all fronts.