Data centres are a critical component of an organisation's information ecosystem but striking a balance between environmental protection and economic growth isn't always easy.
Asia Pacific director of system engineering at Violin Memory, Martin Coleman, explains how flash storage addresses this problem and reduces HVAC costs.
Demand for extra services and data is fast surpassing the space to store all of it. IDC predicts total worldwide data centre space to continue to increase, growing from 1.58 billion square feet in 2013 to 1.94 billion square feet in 2018 with equipment consuming 36 per cent of energy consumption according to a study by Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)
This raises the issue of corporate sustainability - a fine balance between the conflicting needs of environmental protection and economic growth that many businesses constantly seek.
A key challenge of data centre sprawl is to ensure power management and associated costs, such as heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) are minimised, as these amount to 50 per cent of energy consumption according to the same SNIA study.
In fact, servers and data centres account for up to 40 per cent of the energy consumption of commercial office buildings.
Servers and data storage systems in particular consume 26 per cent of energy within the data centre, which places excessive strain on power management, utility grids and HVAC.
For instance, a two-rack hybrid storage array can demand 20kW or more in power to deliver 280TB of usable capacity. All those mechanical drives deliver just two input/output operations per second (IOPS) per watt of power consumed, a very inefficient conversion of energy to business operations.
As a result, architects of modern data centres and private clouds are increasingly looking to adopt new and more power efficient forms of storage technologies, such as flash storage platforms in order to mimimise the effects of data centre sprawl
While disk drives are still the primary IT data storage medium, they are being quickly replaced by flash, as the concept of the all-flash data centre becomes a reality for businesses in competitive markets. In fact, according to IDC, the global market for flash arrays hit $US 11.3 billion in 2014.
A key benefit of using flash is its ability to deliver usable capacity, while being cost and energy effective. These modern technologies can deliver over 480TB of usable capacity, consuming just 3kW of power, which is a significant 85 per cent saving compared with hybrid storage arrays.
They can also deliver over 250 IOPS per watt consumed, whilst significantly the reducing HVAC expenses required, thereby cutting the burden storage systems place on data centre energy consumption.
A business can realise massive savings when applications and users are demanding just 50k IOPS to service customers.
By simply adopting purpose built all-flash technologies that are not dependent on solid state drives (SSDs) cobbled together, each power watt is transformed into a 125 times improved output.
With flash, the concept of highly efficient and sustainable data storage becomes a reality. Simply put, flash storage is like what LEDs are to the old halogen light bulbs of the previous century. As data centre managers become more familiar with the uses and benefits of all flash arrays as primary storage, they will come to realise they don't need football field sized data centres to support current operations.
Flash vendors routinely claim 10 times the savings in footprint and HVAC costs. At the same time they can claim 10 times improvements in application performance for the end-users dependent on those data centres.