* More tips from Chris Bennett of Network Appliance on how storage can help with energy consumption
Today, we continue the discussion with Chris Bennett, vice president of core systems at Network Appliance on how users can reduce the power consumption of their storage gear. This portion of the Q&A focuses on efficient power supplies and other ways that storage can save on data center power.
What about using more efficient power supplies?
In older systems the power efficiency is 60% or so, the newer systems that are coming online now are 80% to 85% efficient. The difference between 60% and 80% efficiency is 20%. The difference between 15,000 RPM drives and using Serial ATA is 100%. You have to look at where all the money is in this.
How else should you look at storage to save data center power?
The third thing to consider is using deduplication http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2007/060407-virtual-tape-library-test-side.html technology wherever you can. That technology in some circumstances doesn’t help at all and in other situations, customers will see 90% savings when they turn on deduplication, especially in a VMware environment. Deduplication will reduce the redundant DLLs and files.
A fourth way is to use thin provisioning aggressively. That can improve power efficiency by about a third. You also want to take advantage of space-efficient snapshots. There are dumb ways to do snapshots and there are smart ways to do snapshots. The best way is to only consume storage with new blocks of data. Customers need to look under the hood – are they copying everything, or only new blocks? The difference between those two can be about a 30% difference in efficiency.
* Check out Network World’s storage buyer’s guide for advice on data backup and replication, Fibre Channel switches, host bus adapters, and more.
