Findings from a survey of IT professionals conducted by ONStor, a provider of NAS solutions:
- At their current data growth rate, 43 percent of respondents could stay in their current infrastructure for only six months to one year if they changed nothing.
- Twenty-four percent reported that the cost and time of building another data center is the most serious issue driving the reduction of data infrastructure power consumption.1
It’s official - green matters. The number one strategic technology for 2008 is Green IT according to Gartner.2 Gartner designates a technology as strategic because implementing it will make a significant difference in an organization’s work. Conversely, not implementing a strategic technology carries a competitive risk.
In any case, green computing can no longer be ignored and is already having an impact on how IT groups budget and implement.
Green computing is confronting many of our preconceived ideas around the physical attributes of the data center. On the one hand, we read articles about McData centers the size of airplane hangars; on the other, we see a struggle to run leaner, thinner and cooler data centers. The challenge is finding a means to balance the astronomical growth of data with the prospect of shrinking physical resources. The data warehouse appliance (DWA) is emerging as one means to achieve this balance.
When the DWA landed on the scene, it certainly displaced many commonplace notions about servers and storage. It challenged the division of roles where some machines were tasked with active computing and others with passive storing. “And never the twain shall meet” in order to leverage efficiencies of each type. The DWA, by its very definition, combines processing and storage in one unit to address the challenges of working with big data. Perhaps not designed to be a green machine, it was in fact engineered to use resources of space and processing capacity extremely efficiently.
Almost all hardware vendors (including DWA vendors) post information about the energy usage of their products. Some, like Dell, even publish the results of lab tests (by Principled Technologies) that put their PowerEdge server through a series of computing loads so that energy-conscious buyers have a detailed picture of power consumption.
Some manufacturers have emphasized cooling, the adjunct to power usage - HP’s Liquid Cooling technology comes to mind, but other approaches such as fans, venting and physical placement of component work to reduce the thermal output or the power required to dissipate it. Much less attention is paid to physical size and the impact it has on a machine’s greenness but size does matter when calculating the cost of floor space and new construction.
It’s when you look at these three aspects together-power consumption, thermal output and physical size - that you get a true sense of a machine’s environmental footprint. These can be brought together to calculate a kind of computing density, if you will. Computing density is a useful tool for quantifying the environmental cost of processing requirements.
Figure 1: Computing Density
In a data warehousing or very large database environment, it’s most useful to look at computing density required per terabyte of data. The Principled Technologies test measures consumption while processing a mere 25MB of data, which doesn’t begin to cover the workload data warehousing infrastructure must bear.
