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By Sufian Dweik, Regional Manager - Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at Brocade Communications
Adding to the complexity of this challenge is the operational requirement for high availability access to applications and data. Mission-critical applications require more powerful processors and redundancy built into all levels including network connectivity, servers, fabric pathing and data storage.
Such requirements are crucial for top tier business applications and the corresponding increase in energy consumption is only but inevitable. However, listed below are some green storage techniques and best practices that can help enterprises achieve high availability of applications and data while actually reducing total energy requirements.
Fabric design
Fabrics provide the interconnect between servers and storage systems. For larger data centres, fabrics can be quite extensive with thousands of ports in a single configuration. Because each switch or director in the fabric contributes to the data centre power bill, designing an efficient fabric should include the energy and cooling impact as well as rational distribution of ports to service the storage network.
Consolidating the fabric into higher port count and more energy efficient director chassis and core-edge design can help simplify the fabric design and potentially lower the overall energy impact of the fabric interconnect.
Leverage storage virtualisation
Storage virtualisation refers to a suite of technologies that create a logical abstraction layer above the physical storage layer. Instead of managing individual physical storage arrays, virtualisation enables administrators to manage multiple storage systems as a single logical pool of capacity.
It should be noted though that on its own, storage virtualisation is not inherently more energy efficient than conventional storage management but can be used to maximize efficient capacity utilization and thus slow the growth of hardware acquisition. By combining dispersed capacity into a single logical pool, it is possible to allocate additional storage to resource-starved applications without having to deploy new energy-consuming hardware.
Storage virtualisation is also an enabling foundation technology for thing provisioning, resizable volumes, snapshots and other solutions that contribute to more energy efficient storage operations.
File system virtualisation
By some industry estimates, 75% of corporate data resides outside of the data centre, dispersed in remote offices and regional centres. This presents a number of issues, including the inability to comply with regulatory requirements for data security and backup, duplication of server and storage resources across the enterprise, management and maintenance of geographically distributed systems and an increased energy consumption for corporate-wide IT assets.
File system virtualisation includes several technologies for centralizing and consolidating remote file data, incorporating that data into data centre best practices for security and backup and maintaining local response-time to remote users. From a green perspective, reducing dispersed energy inefficiencies via consolidation helps lower the overall IT energy footprint.
Utilise data compression
Depending on the implementation, compression can impose a performance penalty because the data must be encoded when written and decoded (decompressed) when read.
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