Green Data Storage

Solutions for saving energy - Green Data Storage

The need for Green Data Storage is greater now than it has ever been. With increasing electricity costs, the continual threat of power outages and global warming predictions, the whole area of data centre storage management needs to be addressed.

We all know that our data storage requirements are doubling every 18 months and whilst disk capacities are also on the increase our appetite for faster, bigger storage arrays is increasingly growing to keep up with business needs. These storage arrays consume vast amounts of power; require cooling, maintenance and constant management.

In order to reduce our Carbon footprint, we need to look at our whole data storage management infrastructure. It is a well-known fact that of our data is not accessed after 90 days.

By moving primary data to a tiered storage architecture utilizing high capacity disk storage in the form of NAS or RAID, LTO / LTFS tape and Optical will save a considerable amount of energy. The users will be unaware of the tiered architecture using Green Data Storage solutions.

Green Data Storage Savings

• Energy – In both air conditioning and data storage power consumption
• Free up valuable Tier 1 disk space, saving on the immediate storage procurement for new trays or chassis and prolong the storage life
• Reduce your backup window by deploying a Tiered Storage Architecture
• Save rack space
• Reduce maintenance costs
• Reduce your Carbon emissions and help you hit government targets for power consumption

The Green Data Storage solutions we supply are based on.

• Disk – RAID / NAS configurations
• LTO & LTFS
• Optical – Blu-ray
• Cloud – Long term storage
• Flash/SSD & IO Accelerators

Many of the RAID data storage solutions we supply support MAID 2.0. MAID stands for Massive Array of Idle Disks, providing Green Energy Savings by powering down the disk drives when not in use, three levels of MAID settings are available and these can be configured using the Web GUI.

MAID storage is designed for infrequently accessed data, sometimes referred to as persistent data, where performance (IOPS or bandwidth) is not a big concern. With better response times than tape, MAID storage has made some headway in the backup market, where customers are eager to increase service levels and improve the reliability of backups. If you want a hard disk based backup and have power or cooling constraints in the data centre, MAID storage is a killer product.

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