Wikitip

What to do if you're out of power or cooling

First, understand that storage is not the major culprit in the data center. IT equipment accounts for about 50% of energy consumption and storage about 20-30% of that piece of the pie. So overall, storage accounts for about 10-15% of the problem. Nonetheless, disk drives are a major culprit of storage power consumption and for those who are desperate – out of power or cooling - the best strategy is to deploy lower RPM drives and look to water cooling if possible.

For those who are not desperate, the best strategy is to wait for the vendors to commit to their green storage strategies while addressing the organizational issues discussed in Can IT be cool again?.

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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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