Portal:Storage

Wikitip

Tips and techniques to go green

Storage managers should project their storage requirements over the next five years, assume a rapid transition to 2.5" drives, and calculate the power, space, power density and cooling requirements. They should then work with the data center designers to ensure that there is sufficient power and cooling available, and that there are the funds and commitment for the necessary infrastructure changes. In addition, storage managers should put in place a green storage infrastructure that will minimize disk drive usage by being able to:

• Turn off spares,
• Aggressively pursue tiered storage with lower RPM drives,
• Implement MAID and/or drive spin down where appropriate,
• Aggressively implement virtualization and thin provisioning to reduce the drives required,
• Consider rear door heat exchangers using chilled water,
• Consider the use of external storage services and/or outsourcing or storage equipment,
• Ask the vendors about their green storage commitment.

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Featured Case Study

Virtualization Energizes Cal State University

John Charles is the CIO of California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) and Rich Avila is Director, Server & Network Operations. In late 2007 they were both looking down the barrel of a gun. The total amount of power being used in the data center was 67KVA. The maximum power from the current plant was 75kVA. PG&E had informed them that no more power could be delivered. They would be out of power in less than six months. A new data center was planned, but would not be available for two years.

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Featured How-To Note

Storage Virtualization Design and Deployment

A main impediment to storage virtualization is the lack of multiple storage vendor (heterogeneous) support within available virtualization technologies. This inhibits deployment across a data center. The only practical approach is either to implement a single vendor solution across the whole of the data center (practical only for small and some medium size data centers) or to implement virtualization in one or more of the largest storage pools within a data center.

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