Storage - The Next Hot Target

Last week at Storage Networking World, SNIA announced it's intention to get in the "green" game with the intent of promoting more energy efficient storage technologies with its "Green Storage Initiative". Given the hype around the green data center it's no surprise that SNIA would want to join in, the question is whether they can do much to help. Before looking at SNIA's role it's worth examining the current state of play.

Reducing the power and cooling requirements in data centers has been a major initiative in many IT organizations in recent times. While some have marketed the effort as part presenting a more "eco-friendly" face to their customers, real motivation for this effort comes from two primary considerations:

• Substantial reductions in the amount of energy consumed by IT can have a significant impact on overall data center costs. 
• educing the energy footprint of the existing IT infrastructure may allow additional infrastructure to be added without requiring a new data center.

But regardless of the motives, it's been an important part of data center strategy.

So far most of the reduction in overall energy footprint for IT has come from the application servers. Application servers were chosen because they represented the largest consumers of energy and because they were used very inefficiently. But a side effect of making the server infrastructure more efficient is that other consumers of power now represent a more attractive target for improvement. Next on the list is storage, according to DELL's CTO Kevin Kettler, storage accounted for 37% of the energy consumed in DELL's data centers, vs. 40% for application servers. With application servers becoming more efficient, it's only a matter of time before storage becomes the number #1 consumer of power in the data center.

The industry has attacked the energy footprint for application servers with two basic strategies:

• More efficient hardware - processors, power supplies and other components of the typical application server have all improved considerably. 
• Better utilization - with ever more powerful servers, the strategy of running a single application on each host is extremely inefficient. Server virtualization has enabled huge gains from consolidation.

The gains from hardware improvements are important, but a drop in the bucket compared to the gains from server virtualization. It's likely that improving utilization will also be the most effective approach for storage, there's only so much you can do to reduce the power requirements of a disk! But storage utilization means different things to different people, so we are likely to see a number of approaches to improving utilization, with technologies such as thin provisioning, automated tiered storage, data deduplication, massive arrays of idle disk (MAID) all having a role to play. But there is no one size fits all solution, IT consumers will need to understand where these technology make sense and how they can be combined into a holistic approach to reducing the energy footprint of storage.

SNIA believes educating IT consumers about these options will be an area where it can help, but I'm not so sure! One of the problems with SNIA is that it is  dominated by large vendors who pay most of its bills and have enough staff to dedicate resources to its working groups, committees and educational efforts.

As a result almost everything SNIA does reflects the wishes of its largest members. Consider the "storage virtualization tutorial" introduced at SNW in 2001. The goal of the tutorial was to educated IT consumers about emerging storage virtualization technologies. At the time there were several relatively low cost software/appliance-based systems that were available. But these approaches represented a serious threat to the major storage companies who preferred expensive switch-based solutions. So it's no surprise that the tutorial gave equal time to both approaches, even though the switch-based solutions were half a decade away from a 1.0 release. The tutorial was also unable to make recommendations, or point out potential drawbacks with the different approaches. So the end result was a watered down overview with no conclusions or actionable recommendations for IT consumers.

I fear that similar problems will impeded any effort by SNIA to educate IT consumers about how to reduce the energy footprint of storage. The vendors who control SNIA will shape the message to best fit whatever technologies they favor, and consumers will be left to work out which ones are available and what the strengths and weaknesses are.

Posted by: Nik Simpson