Sustainable Storage: Consolidation and Efficiency
Key Points
- Modern businesses are facing rapidly rising data storage and energy demands, with data centers consuming about 1 % of global electricity.
- Consolidating fragmented storage into fewer, higher‑density devices is the most effective first step for sustainability, as it reduces unused capacity, cooling needs, and overall carbon footprint.
- When evaluating storage for consolidation, prioritize devices that can scale with growth, offer high capacity density, and provide strong data reduction/compression to minimize hardware footprint.
- Energy efficiency should be measured by performance‑per‑watt or capacity‑per‑watt rather than simply the lowest cost per terabyte, ensuring that high‑performance workloads remain sustainable.
Sections
- Storage Consolidation for Sustainable IT - The speaker emphasizes that, amid rising data usage and its associated energy costs, consolidating underutilized storage into denser, fewer systems is the cornerstone of a three‑part strategy to cut energy consumption, waste, and carbon footprint.
- Energy Efficiency and Waste in Storage - The speaker urges assessing storage solutions by performance‑per‑watt, lightweight, containerized architectures, and device longevity plus responsible end‑of‑life recycling to reduce overall energy consumption and waste.
Full Transcript
# Sustainable Storage: Consolidation and Efficiency **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXINIZHTSGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXINIZHTSGw) **Duration:** 00:05:41 ## Summary - Modern businesses are facing rapidly rising data storage and energy demands, with data centers consuming about 1 % of global electricity. - Consolidating fragmented storage into fewer, higher‑density devices is the most effective first step for sustainability, as it reduces unused capacity, cooling needs, and overall carbon footprint. - When evaluating storage for consolidation, prioritize devices that can scale with growth, offer high capacity density, and provide strong data reduction/compression to minimize hardware footprint. - Energy efficiency should be measured by performance‑per‑watt or capacity‑per‑watt rather than simply the lowest cost per terabyte, ensuring that high‑performance workloads remain sustainable. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXINIZHTSGw&t=0s) **Storage Consolidation for Sustainable IT** - The speaker emphasizes that, amid rising data usage and its associated energy costs, consolidating underutilized storage into denser, fewer systems is the cornerstone of a three‑part strategy to cut energy consumption, waste, and carbon footprint. - [00:03:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXINIZHTSGw&t=202s) **Energy Efficiency and Waste in Storage** - The speaker urges assessing storage solutions by performance‑per‑watt, lightweight, containerized architectures, and device longevity plus responsible end‑of‑life recycling to reduce overall energy consumption and waste. ## Full Transcript
Everyone knows that for modern businesses, data is king.
So you're already thinking about the growth of your overall data usage as you get more business value out of your data.
But have you also thought about your associated storage and energy requirements?
Because those are growing just as fast as your data usage.
In fact, data center energy consumption requires an eye-popping 1% of all energy usage worldwide. And the cost of storing data isn't getting smaller.
It's a big topic.
I'll break it down into three considerations to drive your storage sustainability strategy into consolidation, energy and waste.
First, let's talk about the topic of consolidation.
It's not normally where you would start-- you would normally start the sustainability topic with energy.
But for storage, consolidation is really the key to unlocking a great sustainability strategy.
Think about it: You likely already have a large storage infrastructure with different types of boxes holding different amounts of workloads.
Those are likely not being utilized to their full extent, as we found in a lot of different infrastructure setups.
What we find is that corporations have a lot of different boxes that they're not entirely utilizing.
And they could consolidate these down into one or a few smaller, more dense boxes that require less cooling,
less overall data warehouse space, and therefore less energy for your IT infrastructure and better carbon footprint.
Here's three things to consider when you're trying to decide on a storage device
and whether or not it will help you with a consolidation strategy to have better sustainability in your storage.
First, can your storage device scale with you?
Or do you have to capacity plan out into large purchases and then have unused storage sitting there in your data center?
Second, what's the capacity density like on your device?
Not all devices are created equal.
Some devices can get a lot more done and a lot smaller rackspace, taking up a lot less space, which is a lot less space to cool and power.
The third thing to consider is what type of data reduction or data compression can you get on a storage device?
If you can get really large compression, then you will require a lot less devices for your data.
So moving on to energy.
For energy, I think the big thing to consider is not necessarily the amount of storage devices you have, but what type of storage devices you have.
A lot of times people start the topic of energy looking at the lowest terabyte or lowest kilowatt hour option out there on the market.
But this is not where we should start. Because oftentimes, those options are great for archive or backup data,
but they cannot meet your high performance workloads to meet your fast, impactful driving business, data gathering needs.
Instead, consider topics of energy efficiency in your storage devices.
Think about the type of performance you can get per Watt used or capacity you can get per Watt use.
The other thing to think about for energy is a broader picture of energy.
What's your overall infrastructure like?
Are you bogged down by large data migrations?
Or could you chunk your data into smaller blocks and have lighter weight infrastructure overall and therefore less energy use?
I would encourage you to consider an option that's more containerized
or migrate-able in a more lightweight way so that your overall infrastructure is not as energy consuming.
The final topic is waste.
There are two things to also consider for waste.
The first one is pretty obvious: If you have a device that only lasts two years compared to a device that lasts four years,
you will have considerably more waste with that product.
Overall, you will have a lot more cost of ownership over time as well.
On top of that, you will potentially have a lot of controller updates, upgrades as well that will create more product waste.
Think about the longevity of the device that you're buying upfront in the purchasing decisions.
The second thing for a waste is when it does reach the end of its useful life, what is that IT asset process like for you-- disposal like?
Are you going to get help from the corporation that sold you the device to recycle it and dispose of it sustainably and securely?
Or is that going to be on you to handle that product waste?
[It's] likely not made of recyclable materials and have to go to the landfill and not meet your core requirements.
Overall, here are three big topics to consider when considering your storage sustainability strategy for today and for tomorrow.
Thank you.
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