Reprinted with permission © 2009 TreeTop Technologies
"Green" storage technologies are increasingly popular as energy prices go up and as budgets tighten up. But according to a white paper put out by Gartner late last year, Quantifying the Value of Green Storage Technologies, the cumulative savings of such technologies can mean a very short timeframe for return on investment. So, whatever you put into them, you will quickly see back in many cases.
Among the observations:
An organization deploying a high-end storage system in a typical environment could see up to a 36% reduction in acquisition costs and a $47,000 savings in power and cooling during a three-year period. On a terabyte basis, SATA disk drives typically consume 81% less power than FC disk drives. The data reduction technologies used in network-attached storage (NAS) and virtual tape library (VTL) storage systems are driving the redesign of applications and storage infrastructures, which can result in power and cooling savings of up to 700% in NAS storage, and up to 2,500% in VTL storage.
Footnotes: From "View from the TreeTop" Volume 3 Issue 2 March 2009