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Storage vendors are not the only ones failing on green measures
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01/10/2007
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84% of IT departments say storage vendors should do more to improve the energy efficiency of their products – but 70% admit better management of their own storage resources could help.
Those are among top findings from the BridgeHead Software annual information lifecycle management (ILM) audit. It also finds 60% of IT executives saying their organisations were interested in finding more energy efficient ways of managing data storage.
In the UK, concern over power costs (73%) was the most common reason. Second came concern for the environment (57%), followed by power capacity worries (35%).
Tony Cotterill CEO of BridgeHead Software reckons many organisations are unnecessarily holding too much data on power hungry disk based storage systems.
“There is nothing wrong with demanding more energy efficient solutions from vendors, but many organisations could improve energy efficiency by cutting the data they hold on spinning disk. 61% of organisations in our survey admit that between 30 and 50% of data on their primary disk is unlikely to be accessed ever again.
“While they may need to keep this data for legal or regulatory reasons, they can save power by taking it off to tape, optical disk, removable disk or other systems which do not consume power unless being accessed. Organisations should be looking at defining and implementing archiving rules to move everything off primary storage that is old or infrequently accessed.”
However, BridgeHead’s research shows that while many organisations are starting to use archiving for specific types of data, such as emails (motivated by compliance and disaster recovery), few are archiving for energy efficiency or cost considerations.
“Only when you start taking an organisation-wide approach to archiving will the volume of data you’re taking off the primary store stack up so that you begin to make a real difference in terms of energy savings,” insists Cotterill.
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Author
Brian Tinham
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