Energy Efficiency: What You Can Do: Page 6 of 9

According to William Souder, director of network operations and chief security officer at Berry College in Atlanta, “There is no silver bullet when it comes to energy efficiency. Customers must evaluate a variety of alternative techniques to reduce power consumption and choose the ones that best fit their requirements.”

In general, with storage consumption growing at 50 to 60 percent per year for many customers, and budgets flat to down, the best approach is to find techniques that help consume less storage and/or use storage more efficiently. The other broad technique is to get rid of equipment that is power hungry and to modernize infrastructures.

Here are seven approaches (with associated tradeoffs and caveats) that storage managers can consider to reduce the energy bill.

Classify, migrate & delete

You typically won’t hear vendors lead with this one but from a storage perspective, the root cause of increased energy consumption is that organizations store far too much unnecessary information, including worthless pictures, .pst files that contain junk emails, and truckloads of file versions that will never get accessed. The most important action storage managers can take is to classify information, move data to less power hungry devices and get rid of stuff you don’t need. According to Wikibon users, 80 percent of data never gets accessed after 90 days. Crader’s BT has a policy within his group that after 90 days, data is deleted unless users specifically request a higher threshold. While this policy won’t fly in all industries, in many cases, users keep many duplicate copies of data that has zero business value.

Beyond this critical step, which is usually put on the back burner in favor of other techniques, other storage practices and approaches can be used to address energy consumption and buy some time. Read on.