Innovation - Storage News and Trends

April 2008

Building the Green Data Center

Against a backdrop of skyrocketing energy costs, escalating power consumption, explosive information growth and increased demands from the public and the government for environmentally friendly solutions to these problems, enterprises are looking for new and different ways to develop cost-effective IT infrastructures that require less power to run. Hitachi Data Systems offers a number of hardware and software innovations that can enable companies to be better corporate citizens while reducing power consumption and delivering tangible benefits to the bottom line.

The Solution: Consolidation, Virtualization, and Tiered Storage

Green computing increases the efficiency of asset utilization in a number of ways. First, consolidating storage into bigger and cheaper frames can reduce costs and allow companies to avoid additional purchases that require more power.

Another key green computing method is virtualization, which allows an organization to essentially share infrastructure while still meeting the requirements of the application or the user. By spreading usage of hardware assets across a wider population of users or a wider range of tasks, organizations can increase utilization without a proportional increase in power consumption.

A tiered storage strategy can also play a vital role in controlling power consumption. Instead of using high power, high cost storage resources for all data types, a tiered approach assigns infrequently accessed or low-value files to less expensive hardware and stores the data with the highest use and business value on the highest-performance equipment.

Last, some companies are relocating data centers to cheaper geographic locations -- either close to power supplies or in a region with lower energy costs (such as the Asia-Pacific region). For example, many financial institutions are migrating to new data centers in the Pacific Rim, using those data centers for replication while keeping a data center close to headquarters for failover.

The Challenge: Increasing Data, Costs, and Power Demands

While more companies than ever are trying to reduce their power demands, one upward trend cannot be reversed: the growth of data. And as this data grows, usage requirements can eventually surpass existing computing capacity. This in turn drives the need for more storage. In short, more data means more storage, which means more power, which means more energy consumption. Combine these challenges with energy costs that seem to increase daily, and you have a major issue not only for IT departments, but for the enterprise as a whole.

The Long Term Benefits of Green Computing

The green data center uses less energy, which means lower power consumption and lower expenses – and in today’s economic climate, organizations are more concerned than ever about controlling expenses. They must also be concerned about formulating realistic, long-term plans for coping with rapidly increasing amounts of data. Environmentally friendly data center facilities offer a cost-effective and socially responsible approach to managing the explosive growth of data.

How Services Oriented Storage Solutions Fulfill the Eco-friendly Goal

Services Oriented Storage Solutions align business needs with IT infrastructure in order to provide the most efficient, sensible, cost-effective use of information resources. This focus on efficiency, and on matching the most suitable resource to the application or user, squares perfectly with green computing strategies. It’s all about reducing waste, sharing resources, and making sure that IT infrastructure can respond rapidly and appropriately to whatever demands are placed on it. With Services Oriented Storage Solutions, enterprises can save time, money, and power – which translates to a big net plus for everyone.

Hot Topics	Expert Insight	Best Practices
Environmental Management	A Shift to Green Storage	Eco-friendly Data Centers
Environmental issues, such as global warming and acid rain, are of great concern to Hitachi. A global approach is essential to deal with them. Watch the Video	ITCentrix shows how eco-positioning via minimizing power, cooling and space costs is best achieved with the Hitachi High-performance NAS platform.	Here are five cost-effective steps to building a greener data center. Regardless of your views on global warming, you can still save money.

In this Edition

Get the Facts

Events

Joint Solution Brief:

The Path to a Green Data Center.

Hitachi Data Systems and Brocade.

Press Release:

Hitachi Develops the Long-term Plan "Environmental Vision 2025" to Combat Global Warming. More...

Storage grows greener:

InfoWorld’s Ted Samson talks with Hitachi Data Systems CTO Hu Yoshida about green storage.
Video | Blog post

Podcast:

FT Digital Business, March 12, 2008

Hitachi Data Systems COO Jack Domme discusses rising energy costs in IT, the power of virtualization, and what Hitachi Data Systems is doing to help reduce energy consumption in the data center. More...

Briefing Paper:

Five Cost-effective Steps to Building a More Eco-friendly Data Center.

Overview Brochure:

Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V. More...

AFCOM Data Center World, April 1, 2008, 9am PST.

Hitachi Data Systems’ Hubert Yoshida, CTO, delivers a keynote speech, "Sustainable Data Storage is More Than Green Technology." In his address, he will discuss the importance of sustainable data storage, the disconnect with "green technology," and the best practices required to ultimately contribute to the bottom line. More...

Storage Networking World Spring Conference, April 7-10, 2008

Hitachi Data Systems’ Hubert Yoshida, CTO, is a panelist for "The Greening of IT: an End-User Panel Discussion," on April 8, 2008.

Creating Tuning Manager Reports, April 23, 2008, 9am PST

Hitachi Data Systems’ Himanshu Parida, Senior Software Designer, describes some of the key performance metrics that storage administrators should be concerned with and how to create reports with HiCommand Tuning Manager software to monitor them. More...

Networking Considerations for Optimizing Replication, May 21, 2008, 9am PST, online

Hitachi Data Systems’ Tom Neidhardt, Senior Product and Solution Marketing Manager, and Mark Detrick, Solutions Architect, Extension and Routing, Brocade will discuss the various factors to consider when designing the network to optimize the network for replication. We will look at how to optimize the number of paths, parameters to consider during configuration for both storage and the network routers as well as bandwidth. More...

Managing External Virtualized Storage with Hitachi Device Manager, June 18, 2008, 9am PST, online

John Marotta, e-Learning specialist for the Hitachi Data Systems Academy organization, will discuss how to effectively simplify the management of external storage through the use of Device Manager Logical Groups. More...

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