Data storage plays a critical role in the current environmental landscape, and power and cooling requirements and expenses are now a substantial consideration in data center design.
While data is invaluable for driving innovation and decision-making when analytics is applied, storage and management methods have substantial environmental consequences. With the exponential growth of data that companies are currently experiencing, and is expected to continue for the foreseeable future, the strain on resources and energy consumption is escalating, exacerbating the already dire climate change situation.
Data growth and persistent data that must be protected and preserved long-term for compliance and competitive advantage are significant drivers of higher C02 emissions. Furthur Market Research estimates that data will climb from 4.8 zettabytes in 2022 to 43.3 zettabytes in 2035. For perspective, one zettabyte is equivalent to 55 million 18-terabyte hard disk drives.
Enterprise storage is consuming more power in data centers, particularly with the adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs), hard disk drives (HDDs), and more recently, graphics processing units (GPUs), which consume a tremendous amount of energy and electricity compared with other available technologies, such as tape. According to the aforementioned report, Furthur Market Research expects enterprise storage consumption to increase by 50 times between 2010 and 2050.
Additional statistics underscore the magnitude of the problem: Research indicates that data centers currently contribute 2% of global CO2 emissions and consume 3% of the world’s electricity – a figure projected to rise to 13% by 2030.
More data centers than ever are under construction and as they grow bigger, they get more power-hungry. A typical center used to consume 10 megawatts of electricity. Today, a typical center consumes 10 times that amount.
In the next five years, consumers and businesses will generate twice as much data as all the data created over the past 10 years. In response, total storage capacity in data centers and endpoint devices will grow from 10.1 zettabytes (ZB) in 2023 to 21.0 ZB in 2027 – or about double in size.
In addition, the proliferation of power-intensive technologies, such as GPUs and high-capacity storage drives, further compounds the issue of power consumption, necessitating urgent action to find sustainable alternatives.
As a result, storage will increasingly be scrutinized. Chief sustainability officers will put more pressure on chief information officers, who will turn to data center managers to examine power consumption levels.
Finding ways to leverage less power-consuming technologies will help organizations make their data storage more sustainable and better prepare them for the future ahead. What can we do to make data centers greener? It comes down to understanding data, its usage, and managing it more flexibly.
Archived Data Storage for Greater Sustainability
Most data becomes inactive or archival in 90 days; at this point, it is often moved to a less costly storage medium, such as a tape system, and usually referred to as “cold data.” Moving data from disk to tape media dramatically reduces carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions. Brad Johns Consulting estimates that an 87% reduction in carbon emissions can be achieved by moving 10 PB of data from disk to tape storage.
The power savings of tape vs. disk is substantial:
- A single tape library can handle unlimited tapes since they can be removed and stored externally.
- Tape storage requires 0 watts unless it’s actively being read.
- Disk storage requires constant power as the disk is constantly spinning.
- Moving inactive data to tape storage helps reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions.
- The useful life of a disk drive is 3-5 years vs. tape, which is up to 20 years.
Another consideration is the lifecycle impact of storage solutions. From raw material extraction to end-of-life disposal, every stage of a product’s life cycle contributes to its carbon footprint. By opting for storage solutions with longer lifespans, such as archived data, organizations can minimize e-waste and reduce their overall environmental impact.
For all of these reasons, archiving data is an obvious solution for reducing carbon footprint, CO2 emissions, waste, and landfill materials. The challenge, however, is that archival storage technology can be difficult to manage and data access can often be slower than online storage such as HDD or SSD. Using an advanced data management platform can remove the complexity traditionally associated with archival storage, and present all storage through a single access point, regardless of the underlying storage technology or physical location.
Intelligent Data Placement
Accessing archived data does not need to be cumbersome. The key is to use the right type of storage for different data needs and data management technology that integrates with other solutions, has multiple protocols, and accommodates multiple storage systems. In particular, creating an active archive is one way to offload tier 1 storage, free up valuable space on expensive primary storage, and still store all of an organization’s data online and keep it easily accessible.
For example, by leveraging a combination of tape and disk storage, companies can achieve significant reductions in both energy consumption and CO2 emissions. A reduced energy cost contributes to a 78% lower total cost of ownership for a tape solution and 46% lower with an active archive system.
Even better, data management technology that places data in the best storage enables users to construct storage ecosystems tailored to their specific needs while improving the sustainability of their data centers. This intelligent data placement optimizes storage efficiency by automatically tiering data based on access patterns or user defined policies. Data can be moved from energy-intensive storage tiers to those that are more economical and eco-friendly ones and contribute to greater sustainability.
This approach to data management allows companies to take advantage of low-power storage options that are typically difficult to access. Because it quickly and seamlessly integrates with an organization’s global environment, data can be stored, accessed, and used as needed, regardless of where it resides. Low-power storage now brings high-value sustainability to the data center.