Data Center Storage

Storage is a major concern for data center managers. In fact, 28% of data center managers identified storage growth as the trend having the greatest impact on their data operations. In 2012, most data centers report data storage growth at 10 to 24% annually.⁵

Data storage purchases are complex decisions that involve consideration of many factors (e.g., uptime, retention policies, automation, networking options, disaster recovery, future growth, options in the cloud, physical space limitations, etc.). By selecting ENERGY STAR certified data storage, one part of that purchasing decision — energy efficiency — can be done quickly and easily.

In addition, one watt-hour of energy savings at the storage level results in roughly 1.9 watt-hours of facility-level energy savings.⁶ These additional savings stem from reducing energy waste in the power infrastructure (e.g., power distribution unit, uninterruptible power supply) and reducing 24/7 energy needed to cool the waste heat produced by data storage.

¹Exabyte equal to 1 billion gigabytes.
²Efficiency will hold down storage growth, IDC says. ComputerWorld, By Stephen Lawson, June 17, 2013. The breakdown is 102 exabytes of external storage and 34 exabytes of internal (with the server) storage.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240115/Efficiency_will_hold_down_storage_growth_IDC_says
³http://www.whatsabyte.com
⁴Efficiency will hold down storage growth, IDC says. ComputerWorld, By Stephen Lawson, June 17, 2013. The breakdown is 102 exabytes of external storage and 34 exabytes of internal (with the server) storage.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240115/Efficiency_will_hold_down_storage_growth_IDC_says
⁵2012 State of the Data Center, Information Week, June 2012, by Kurt Marko.
⁶2012 Data Center Industry Survey, Uptime Institute, 2012. Survey indicated that the average power usage effectiveness, the ratio of total to IT energy in data center, was roughly 1.9.