Skip Links

Network World

  • Social Web 
  • Email 
  • Close

$1.3 billion spent on storage power and cooling, IDC says

Storage needs continue to skyrocket
By Jon Brodkin , Network World , 06/26/2008

The cost of providing power and cooling to all the world’s spinning disk drives exceeded $1.3 billion in 2007, IDC says in a new report

More than 49 million hard disk drives (HDDs) were spinning in external storage arrays worldwide in 2007, and electricity cost seven cents per kilowatt-hour. The IT power and cooling burden is sure to become even more extreme, IDC says. More than 14 exabytes of storage were sold to enterprises worldwide in the 10-year period ending in 2007. Nearly eight times that much -- 110 exabytes -- will ship in just the next five years, IDC predicts. (Compare storage products.)

These numbers probably underestimate the total storage by a significant amount. IDC's totals do not include servers or blades with fewer than three disk drives; drives used for test, research and development; or drives installed as supplements or replacements in existing storage arrays.

IDC credited HDD vendors with doing a "masterful job" keeping pace with growing storage requirements, but IT shops are still in a precarious position.

"IT managers are faced with a dilemma of how to meet terabyte storage-growth requirements of greater than 50% with storage devices that have capacities increasing at less than 40%," IDC analyst David Reinsel writes.

Enterprises can increase the number of drives and arrays, or use Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives, which store three or four times more data than drives optimized for performance, such as Fibre Channel and SCSI.

"Adopting lower 'tiers' of storage based on capacity-optimized drives is exactly what the industry did and continues to do," IDC writes. However, "the adoption of SATA drives into enterprise storage helped to soften but did not eliminate a number of serious issues for data center managers, including limited square footage, limited budgets, and limited power and cooling supplies."

Vendors have improved capacity and price points dramatically, but quality measurements are improving only slowly in some areas. While the number of gigabytes per drive has risen greatly, speed measured in input/output operations per second (IOPS) per drive has improved slowly, "resulting in a decline of IOPS per gigabyte."

Such strategies as thin provisioning and data deduplication can help lower power costs, but ultimately customers will have to make tradeoffs between efficiency and performance, IDC notes.

Partner Content

Explore the Ultrium Edge

The powerful tape technology can address data security with tape encryption as well as long term data protection.

Find out more

Disk and Tape Square Off

Discover what disk and tape really cost -- and which solution provides lower total cost of ownership and optimizes energy use for your organization

Download the White Paper

Don't Fall For The Myths

The Clipper Group explores the truth behind the myths of tape, digging into the misconceptions in the disk vs. tape debate.

Download the White Paper

Will You Add Tape Too?

Over two thirds of disk-only users look to add tape back into storage infrastructure according to recent survey.

Download Survey Information

Comment
Login
Forgot your account info?
Add comment
Anonymous comments subject to approval. Register here for member benefits.
Have a NetworkWorld account? Log in here. Register now for a free account.

Videos

rssRss Feed
Get instant email notification when white papers, webcasts, executive guides are added to our library. Stay informed and up-to-date with the latest on IT Technologies with Network World's Resource Alerts.

Whitepapers

Advancing the Economics of Networking

Aging network systems and old habits have dictated how businesses spend their IT budgets. As a...

Implementing HA at the Enterprise Data Center Edge to Connect to a Large Number of Branch Offices

This paper reviews the problem of creating a network where the dynamic availability of services is...

Enterprise Data Center Network Reference Architecture

Using a High Performance Network Backbone to Meet the Requirements of the Modern Enterprise Data...

Webcasts

PoE Plus: Impact on the PoE Market

The standard for Power over Ethernet (PoE), IEEE Std. 802.3af(tm)-2003, advanced networking,...

Harnessing the power of communications to increase workplace performance

Due to the convergence of IT and telecommunications technologies, the business workplace has been...

Stay out of the headlines: Detecting and preventing network intrusions

How do YOU stay out of the headlines? There is no denying that risk exists in our computer-driven...

Special Reports

How to lower software costs, complexity

Discover how Software as a Service is the economical alternative to expensive on-site software,...

IT Buyer's Guide To: Data backup and Replication

Learn the latest on Data backup software tools that allow professionals to safekeep their data...

Bringing IT Operations Management to Open Source and Beyond

Learn how to cost effectively and efficiently manage your open source environment in this...