I find it ironic that Seagate chose Earth Day to celebrate the shipment of its billionth disk drive. After all, increased drive dependency in the datacenter is fast transforming into an unsustainable energy demand. Of course, the blame does not fall entirely on drive vendors. For the most part, they are simply responding to opportunity. But this Earth Day billionth-drive milestone can’t help but remind me of oil companies feasting on record profits while consumers struggle with high prices at the pump. Think I’m exaggerating the environmental impact of the electricity used in the datacenter? Consider this: According to an EPA study on datacenter energy use, servers and other computer room equipment burned 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006 — about 1.5 percent of all electricity used in the U.S. And, if we do nothing, energy use in the datacenter will more than double by 2011, creating an energy demand equivalent to 10 additional power plants, according to the report. More disheartening is that the report — the most comprehensive analysis of power usage in IT that I have read — is likely optimistic in terms of its estimates. After all, storage demand could very well grow at a faster pace than anticipated, sapping even greater levels of energy in the process. According to that EPA report, storage accounted for only 5 percent of the energy devoured by the datacenter in 2006, with servers and infrastructure absorbing 90 percent. Yet whereas virtualization and other consolidating techniques provide quick, easy efficiencies for servers, storage consolidation is a more difficult undertaking, and one that may not, in fact, generate an equivalent payoff in efficiency. Yes, larger capacity drives could, for example, cut the number of spindles allocated to an application down to 10 percent or less. Yet that benefit could very well be nullified by increased demands elsewhere — increased reliance on disk-to-disk backups, increased amounts of reference data stored in online repositories, both of which translate into more spinning drives. I agree with the point that Kelly Lipp, vice president of manufacturing and CTO of STORServer makes in his blog “How Green is My Backup“, which is, in essence, that storing data on tape puts a much lighter demand on energy than using disk drives. However, I can’t agree with his conclusion that going back to tape for the majority of the data and leaving only what needs frequent and fast access on disk is the way to go, in the main because identifying the latter is not always possible. Often we spread our transactional data over a large number of drives, not because we need the capacity but to improve performance. This is another common scenario that results in wasted resources — and one that could benefit from consolidation, if only we can find a device fast enough to replace multiple drives without sapping performance. For a few vendors, SSDs (solid state drives) with their contained energy demand and promising fast reads could make fast data access more environmentally friendly. Read, for example, what Amyl Ahola, CEO and blogger for Pliant Technology, a startup in the SSD space just leaving stealth mode, has to say in his blog: “A hybrid solution combining existing hard drives (preserving some of the initial investment) with selectively deployed EFDs (enterprise flash drives) can greatly enhance I/O performance while eliminating the need for HDD over-provisioning. Best of all, this type of approach can slash data center energy consumption up to 80 percent in some cases.”EFD is the SSD product that Pliant expects to ship later this year. Of course, the efficacy of this and other SSD products have yet to be proven in real-world scenarios, but it’s undeniable that storage solutions would benefit immensely from a device that bridges the gap between tapes and disk drives, blending the low energy cost of the former with the random, fast access of the latter. For now, the Copan approach with arrays of drives that can be powered down when not in use seems to be the closest we can get to that ideal. But it requires a complete replacement of existing storage, which can make many IT managers hesitant. To reach this conclusion is unfortunate but not entirely unexpected. After all, energy efficiency in storage units remains a tough nut to crack. Luckily, as the numbers from that EPA report suggest there are more pressing energy demands in the datacenter that can be addressed while we wait for that perfect storage device to develop.Technorati Tags: Seagate,Pliant,Copan,StorServer,EPA,Energy efficiency,Energy Star,Storage,SSD,solid state drives,MAID,Server consolidation,virtualization