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High Stakes. High Voltage.
Events of the past few years have brought much attention to electricity as the most critical factor for the IT sector. The East Coast blackout of 2003, numerous hurricanes in Florida and the Gulf Coast, fires in Southern California, floods, earthquakes and tsunamis have all caused lasting and widespread power outages. Without electricity, there is no IT industry. Electricity is mission-critical, it is the lifeblood of IT. Network switching gear, computers and disk drives are the largest electricity consumers. Technology packaging places more boxes into more racks in the data center, increasing heat density exponentially. Before the year 2000, servers drew about 50 watts of electricity, now they use up to 250 watts and there are more of them. Blade server technology best illustrates this point. As many as 60 servers can be placed in a standard height 42U (U=1.75") rack. The typical power demand (power and cooling) for this configuration is over 4,000 watts. Multi-core processor chips help but the trend for high-density packaging is well under way without much attention yet focused on energy.
Poor storage management practices such as keeping disks spinning with mostly low-activity data also unnecessarily increases energy consumption and expense. It is estimated that over 50 percent of all electricity consumed in the United States by the year 2010 will be by computing technologies and the growing number of related IT appliances. Data centers currently use well over100 watts per square foot, more than 10 times that of the average household. The cost of energy is now increasing at over 30 percent annually in many geographic locations, making energy consumption a major and growing consideration in the total cost of ownership for computing equipment. A few new technologies have been identified to address the energy consumption problem. The mounting energy issue will encourage the more aggressive use of environmentally conservative storage solutions such as removable media for less-active data and will soon make an energy strategy mandatory.
Source: Horison Information Strategies: Storage Navigator
© 2005 Horison
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