Green Storage Shades Across the Atlantic: Survey (25-Sep-07)
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Full story: Green Storage Shades Across the Atlantic: Survey (25-Sep-07)
A recent survey by Bridgehead Software has found that North American businesses are more worried about running out of power in the data centre, whereas, British companies appeared to be more concerned about the environment.
Bridgehead highlights how moving data from a spinning disk onto a non-rotating tape or optical disk will reduce electricity bills and could save upto 80% of primary storage. Storage problems have arisen partly in response to companies running scared about compliance, but it is also due to the fact that technolgy purchasing power isn't always in the IT department. For a real difference to be made an enterprise wide approach to archiving will need to be taken rather than a divisional approach where archiving is taking place for compliance and disaster recovery reasons only.
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The biggest reason why North American and British businesses want to reduce storage power consumption is to cut their electricity bills, but in the two locations some of their other motives for going green are different.
North American businesses are much more likely than their UK counterparts to be worried about running out of power in their data centers, while more British companies are concerned about the environment. Those are the findings of a survey completed this summer by archiving specialist Bridgehead Software.
Of North American respondents to the survey, 67% cited electricity costs as a motive for reducing power consumption, against 73% in the UK.
Concern over power capacity was cited by 59% of respondents in North America, compared to only 35% in Britain. When it came to the environment, the numbers were about reversed, with 35% of North American respondents naming environmental concerns as a reason to reduce power consumption, compared to 57% in the UK.
The survey covered 324 IT managers in North America, and 148 in the UK.
Of the North American respondents, 88% said that storage vendors should improve the efficiency of their products, but another 74% said that they themselves could reduce energy consumption, simply by managing data differently.
As an archiving supplier, Bridgehead pointed out that moving data off spinning disk onto non-rotating tape or optical disk will reduce electricity bills.
"61% of organizations in our survey said that between 30% and 50% of data on their primary disk is unlikely to be accessed ever again," said Bridgehead marketing vice president Patrick Dowling.
BridgeHead said that while businesses are beginning to archive specific types of data such as emails for compliance and disaster recovery reasons, few are archiving data to cut energy consumption.
Much of this archiving is currently being driven by non-IT departments such as finance. But to use archiving to cut power consumption significantly, customers will need to take an "enterprise-wide" approach to archiving, Bridgehead said.
- Source: [Computergram]
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Companies Could Free Up 80% of Storage Capacity (27-Sep-07)
IT directors already possess the power to slash their data storage requirements by 80% and improve their green footprint without heavy investment in new technology, according to Bridgehead Software's CEO Tony Cotterill.
A recent Bridgehead survey of 148 UK IT executives revealed that 84% of IT departments wanted storage vendors to do more to improve energy efficiency of their products.
But Cotterill told ComputerWire that IT departments should first take a closer look at their own internal data management practices and be wary of vendors putting a green marketing gloss on old existing technology.
"It's rather like when labels were put on cans saying there's no fat in beans well, there never was any fat to begin with," said Cotterill. "Some vendors are crowing about attributes they already had."
The chief problem is that companies keep too much data in primary storage, when only 1% of data over a year old is every accessed again. At the end of the year, data should be moved off disk to tape, optical storage, or some other long-term storage platform.
"Keeping data on primary storage is expensive once you add in failover and RAID. They could save 80% of primary storage just by taking data off and putting it on something 'green' tape, optical, or cheaper disks," said Cotterill.
Given the rates of storage expansion, clawing back 80% of data space could equate to saving three years' worth of storage budget.
Cost is the main issue driving green initiatives, found the Bridgehead survey. While concern for the environment (57%) and power capacity (35%) were important to respondents, the key reason behind their green thinking was to reduce power costs (73%).
"Green is still how much money can I save," said Cotterill.
Some 60% of the IT departments surveyed were interested in finding more energy-efficient ways of looking at their data management.
Storage problems have arisen partly in response to companies running scared about compliance, but it is also down to a shift in IT director responsibilities. IT chiefs' boards-eye view of IT means they are more removed from day-to-day storage issues and focused instead on servicing the business.
"When I talk to CIOs, I say I bet I could delete 80% of your data and no one would notice they agree with me," said Cotterill.
Another contributing factor is that technology purchasing power isn't always in the IT department. Email archiving, for example, is often bought by the risk assessor or financial director, who have little understanding of the IT impact of their actions.
"They take email out of Exchange and solve the 'Exchange problem', but where do they put the data? On disc. So they haven't solved the storage problem, just moved it somewhere else," said Cotterill.
The starting point for change is for IT directors to determine what data they have and how often do they need to access it, and choose their storage media accordingly.
- Source: [Computergram]
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