Is storage the next hot issues? by Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Mar 15 2010)

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   A couple of announcements in the last few days make me think storage could be the next hit issue in green data centers. 

   Firstly, I sat through a long launch event for what we can now think of as Oracle's new hardware division: Sun Microsystems (my report should be here by the time this goes live).  Mostly it was all about how great the Sun servers are, and how Oracle is somehow going to go in two directions at once - making those servers into super-fast tuned Oracle application servers, while simultaneously keeping them ahead of the other Unix servers for general purpose use. 

   But the hardware guy, Simon Culmer, formerly a Sun sales director, came to life when he got to the storage. This, he said, was the most excited he had been about anything since Sun replace the Motorola 68030 processor and launched its first Sparc-based workstation. To bring out something so sacred to Sun's history, in the context of the comapny's new owners, he was clearly pretty excited. 

   And what got him going was the role of Flash in storage. "You can make a fast, reliable, low power storage subsystem if you put Flash in front of the most boring disk subsystem," he said. "But you have to have incredible software." Flash gives you a low power, reliable front end, and makes any storage look like Tier I storage - the kind of storage that goes on expensive RAID subsystems. It's worth mentioning in passing that a "storage" Tier 1, is the most reliable, not the least - and annoyingly enough, that's the opposite of an Uptime Institute tier I.

   The comparisons are most impressive, and have remained good since Sun introduced the idea in 2008 (and have been picked up elsewhere). The Flash based solid state drives can operate at a fraction of the cost, taking a fraction of the space of traditional storage systems. Like many other parts of the data centre story, it's a win-win offer. It saves money, space and carbon footprint. 

   I think storage vendors are going to be ramping up the green aspect of their sales - if it isn't already at a high enough pitch - and getting more involved in moves to make data centers more efficient. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) this week announced it will endorse the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency, The Code, which I've mentioned here, is a voluntary set of guidelines to reduce wasted energy in data centres and it needs al the support it can get, from all accounts. 

   
   All in all, expect storage to figure more prominently than ever in green discussions this year.  

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