On February 24th 2009, the Wikibon community convened to continue a panel discussion started at last fall’s Storage Networking World in Dallas. Participating in the call were:
- Daryl Molitor - Senior Architect at JCPenney
- Phil Bullinger - Executive Vice President, Engenio Storage Group, LSI
- Clod Barrera - Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist at IBM Systems & Technology Group
- Ken Osterberg - Director, Enterprise PLM Portfolio Strategy at Seagate
More than 80 Wikibon members joined the call. Daryl Molitor kicked things off and shared some excellent metrics around energy efficiency at his organization.
Eight noteworthy themes emerged from the research meeting:
- U.S.-based companies, while behind European and Japanese counterparts, are getting serious about energy efficiency and are beginning to demonstrate meaningful results.
- Green IT generally and green storage specifically, remain bottom line exercises, inextricably linked to overall data-center efficiency.
- The economic downturn is definitely (negatively) impacting longer term energy initiatives; however high double-digit efficiency gains are being reported by users implementing many small but collectively meaningful improvements.
- By simply advancing technology, users are gaining the benefits of 'going green.'
- However, getting rid of useless data remains the greatest opportunity for users to improve efficiencies and cut costs. Good tools (e.g. data classification) remain limited, with busy IT organizations often choosing the convenience of adding more storage over cleaning up the mess.
- Tiered storage systems exploiting higher capacity, slower spin-speed devices and automated data movement are being supported by storage virtualization architectures.
- Tier 0 solid state disk and flash technologies are gaining mindshare and hold substantial promise to improve energy efficiency. Consolidating short-stroked FC devices remains the near-term opportunity, while longer term exploitation will require substantial architectural change.
- Standards are evolving from organizations such as SNIA to foster repeatable, consistent measurements for power consumption of storage arrays, with the goal of ultimately allowing users to trade workload for power and ideally align data, workload and device power characteristics. Drive standards around power management are moving forward to support this effort, however users should not expect subsystem-level results until the 2010 timeframe.
In addition, technology innovations including thin provisioning, data de-duplication, wide-striping, and spindown continue to gain momentum as field data increasingly suggests improved utilization and other benefits result from implementing these capabilities. IT management must be cautioned however not to allow these technologies to supersede cleaning house of unnecessary data. Defensible policies to eliminate 'junk' data remain vital.
Finally, organizations should look for measurement technologies to emerge, first in the form of intelligent power distribution units (PDU's), which, while more expensive, will provide CIO's with better visibility on energy consumption at the device level. Over time, expect embedded instrumentation at the device level to measure power consumption in near real time.
Action Item: Driven by economics, energy efficiency is moving beyond the hype phase into the meaningful adoption stage. In difficult times, with tight capital spending, IT organizations must find the resources and time to clean out unnecessary data. Advanced storage technologies will naturally progress and be adopted but users must endeavor to practice disciplined approaches to storage retention and deletion.
Footnotes: Special thanks to Daryl Molitor, Phil Bullinger, Ken Osterberg, Clod Barrera, Amber Strong and Brian Garabedian for helping make this Peer Incite possible.
