In the last few years, a lot of efforts have been directed towards making hardware energy effcient. However, its mostly the server architecture that has been the focus of attention and research. Now, vendors are developing ways to make storage energy effcient too.

Get the big picture
You cannot drive effciencies in the storage setup without a good understanding of your data, a knowledge of how the storage has been provisioned, what capacities are being used, and so on. This will bring to fore the underutilised capacities, the type of data stored on various devices, and so on. And it will give you a very good idea of how to bring in effciencies. Should you consolidate, virtualize, replace some hard drives with solid state drives, look for drives with special power saving features…you will come up with your list.

Consolidate
Do you really need multiple small capacity HDDs for your data, or can you replace them with a few bigger ones? Or can you replace the small capacity HDDs with the same number of higher capacity ones—this will increase your capacity, but keep your power needs the same.

Virtualise
With storage virtualisation you can provision storage to fewer physical drives and thus improve the levels of utilisation. With thin provisioning, you can have capacity allocated when you need them, and not have to provision space in anticipation.

Bring in energy efficient components
Drives, controllers, arrays…all these components pack energy saving mechanisms. There are drives that support various spindle speeds so that they can slow down when data is not being accessed. Controllers that use less power are now available. You could also opt for smaller drives that ft into your storage arrays, but which will consume far less power.

Try new energy savers
Opting for solid state drives translates into lower power costs as there are no mechanical parts that are made to move. They have smaller footprints, and thus save space as well. MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) enables powering down multiple disks at any given time.

Explore FCoE
Using Fibre Channel over Ethernet, you can consolidate the network (IP) and SAN traffc through a single switch. This helps you reduce the number of network interface cards you need to deploy to connect the storage and IP networks. FCoE also brings down the number of switches you need and the amount of cables required. And it reduces power and cooling costs. However, FCoE may not be the solution for all storage setups. You must do a cost-benefts analysis before you opt for it.

Go back to tape
Tape is the most power effcient media of all. So with all these efforts to control costs to stay on the right side of green, there is a renewed interest in using tape.

Dedupe
Removing duplicates of your data releases storage capacity. And also save your bandwidth usage. This brings in effciencies.

Tier your storage
Put the most-accessed data on expensive high-speed storage devices, and move the less-accessed data to lower-speed cheaper devices. That’s tiering of storage. However, you might want to re-look at your storage setup to see if tiering has been deployed optimally. Software that enables the moving of data across tiers in a seamless manner also ensures that there are many takers for tiering.

Measure efficiency
This is a tough one. While the US Environmental Protection Agency has embarked on its project to bring in green storage specifcations, there is plenty of work still left to be done. EPA is aiming to develop an Energy Star rating for storage equipment. While all vendors claim effciencies, there are no real standards available to help a customer measure how energy effcient the devices really are. With specifcations and metrics likely to make an appearance shortly, vendors will be helping customers understand their device effciencies. There are also discussions on various models for measuring effciency, such as those that measure energy consumed when data is at rest, others that measure energy consumption when data is being accessed at typical rates, and so on.

Dispose in a green way
You might be looking at retiring your old storage devices. Being able to dispose them off in an eco-friendly manner is also a matter that falls under your green storage initiatives. Check with your storage vendors about the disposal processes and opt for them.

There are many ways to go green in the enterprise storage space. Green storage is a lot about driving effciencies through virtualisation, information lifecycle management, and using intelligent software. However, all this requires you to dive deeply into your data and understand how it is being stored and read, and then arrive at a storage strategy that focuses on delivering business benefts while keeping the costs in check.