Greener Storage
Green measures have been incorporated into hardware devices over the years. “People are conscious that there is a pressing need to consume less energy,” Kreutz said. “Some customers also actively ask for energy-efficient products, suggesting that there is a growing awareness which might contribute to wider spread of such products.” As of now, energy-efficient products are carried by forward-looking partners and industry experts, but offered as an added attraction to users.
Advanced servers and storage today have efficiency and green features that conserve power, reduce the carbon footprint, produce less heat and improve overall data center efficiencies with easier management, Yogeshwar said.
“Equipment will continue to be bigger and more energy-saving as time goes on, but energy efficiency is not seen as selection criteria, and this would be hard to change in the short-term,” Harraway said.
Power consumption can be saved up to 80 percent under normal usage, and active participants of the 80 PLUS initiative project and other similar projects are dedicated to energy saving. “By designing drives that consume less power, the drives not only emit less heat — which enhances reliability — but help surveillance users save on electricity costs,” said Ed Strong, Director of AV Storage, Western Digital. Power-saving features such as disk standby would stop disk spinning when idling, and storage devices with 2.5-inch drives could reduce up to 30 percent of power consumption, Chou added.
Users are keen to save energy to lower operating costs. “Customers can also save power while running redundancy features by using other technologies out there,” Clark said. “Unlike RAID systems, which write small packets of information to multiple disks at a time to create redundancy, it is possible to write to each disk sequentially until capacity.” This reduces the number of HDDs running by 87 percent, power consumption by as much as 80 percent and overall hard disk failure rate, Clark added.
“Another option is to write data sequentially across the entire disk, exploiting the sequential nature of video recording,” Clark continued. “This reduces HDD operating temperature, eliminates vibration and minimizes wear to an absolute minimum, thus increasing the reliability of individual HDDs.”
Optimization software is also another consideration, which minimizes the amount of storage required and power consumption due to heating and cooling, and is cost-saving on hardware rack space, Whitney said. “This kind of technology ensures nonstop, frameloss- free recording and playback, without ever having to shut the system down for maintenance or defragmenting the disks — common problems in IT commodity servers and storage systems.”
In spite of all these attractive green features, consider personal need and user habit before jumping the gun. “Never assume anything,” Regalado urged users to examine and question green features more closely. “For instances, the drives may have the capability of spinning down, but the controller setup does not take advantage of the feature. Or, the power supplies may be more efficient but not at the particular loading it is feeding. Newer low-power processors are more efficient but are underpowered and running in turbo mode (automatic increased clock rates), and are now drawing as much power or more as a proper-size CPU for the requirement.” Coupling greener features with greener user habits seems to be the way to maximize energy efficiency benefits.