Energy costs in the data center are rising at a dizzying rate. They already account for the second largest line item associated with datacenter operations and are predicted to rise to 50% of the overall IT budget in just a few years.
Steadily rising energy costs have been the norm for some time now, with customers paying more for power every year. Today, the average cost of utilities for a 100,000-square-foot data center is running at a staggering $5.9 million annually, and it?s getting worse. Even if an enterprise devotes this level of spend to energy every year, it runs the risk of running out of power eventually, especially if it?s powered via an older utility infrastructure: Gartner reports that by 2008, 50% of IT managers will not have enough power to run their data centers. Compounding this problem, data centers waste energy on inefficient server and storage infrastructures, with wastage calculations running as high as 60% in many environments. Yet in spite of these present and future challenges, the situation is not entirely bleak.
IT has already made inroads into controlling energy costs associated with servers. With ten million--and counting--servers installed in the U.S. alone, corralling runaway server costs has already resulted in significant energy savings. IT managers have focused their early energy efficiency efforts on consolidating and virtualizing servers, moving away from the common x86 server model with an average 24-hour utilization rate of 10% to 15% toward powerful new server technologies for which utilitization rates run 75% and higher. The savings have been dramatic: in data centers optimized for energy efficiency, cost savings gained by reducing the power footprint for cooling and electrical approach 80%. And the energy savings does not stop at the server itself: consolidation also reduces the number of power-grabbing switches, backup servers, and other server-related components.
Yet in spite of dramatic gains in server consolidation and energy savings, there remains a gaping hole in the enterprise data center: storage. IDC pegs raw storage growth now approaching a whopping 60% compounded annual growth rate. Storage is gobbling up power, and the same principles that govern server power savings should be applied to storage as well.
Storage: A World of Its Own
Historically, servers have consumed much more power than storage, but this trend has changed in recent years. Two factors have changed this dynamic: Server technology is on a very fast development path, so the same
amount of server power consumption last year will deliver more
processing power on this year?s server technology. Storage technology
is limited by hard disk drives that have been evolving at a more
measured pace, so the number of drives per server is growing.
Increased business continuity requirements, which necessitate the
replication of data to protect against system, site or even regional
failures, and the growing trend to leverage a great variety of
information for business operations are driving customers to store
more data than they ever have before. And because of stringent
compliance regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, many organizations have
decided that it is safer to retain all company information.
As a result, even though data centers may commonly cut 50% or more power consumption with server consolidation projects, without a corresponding effort on the storage side, data centers will continue to suffer from significant ? and unnecessary--energy demands.
Energy demands in the storage domain occur both in the server-to-storage data path and in storage-to-storage tiers. Energy management requires a comprehensive approach with end-to-end management from servers to primary storage to storage tiers.
Storage and Servers
Even now, the majority of storage utilized in many large computing environments is attached to small servers. There is a shortsighted but common IT purchasing practice that promotes the acquisition of another cheap server with additional disk drives when more storage is needed for an application. However, the reality is that each drive is only utilized 10-15% on average. Simple math demonstrates what a waste of energy and resources this practice translates into. Scaling out cheap servers is tempting at the outset because it is so easy to do, but it will bite back via poor management capabilities and energy drain in the long run. Instead of going with an energy-intensive and cumbersome direct-attached storage (DAS) model, plan purchases around optimized, networked storage.
Tiered Storage
Information lifecycle management and tiered storage strategies are critical to managing storage on many levels, and power consumption is an important factor. For background, a tier one array configured with 73 GB drives might deliver significantly more performance than a tier two array configured with 500 GB drives, but it also consumes a lot more energy per terabyte stored because it requires many more drives to achieve the same capacity.
As a general guideline, the easiest way to maximize energy efficiency in an array is to utilize the largest capacity drives that your application ?s availability and performance requirements will permit. Since the power used by the drive is about the same regardless of capacity, the larger the drive, the more efficient it will be in terms of watts per terabyte stored. By moving less critical or under-used data to a lower storage tier, you can reduce the number of tier one spindles and streamline the associated backup infrastructure. Whether you are tiering storage across multiple arrays, or tiering within a single array, it makes sense to consider energy efficiency in the context of equipment acquisition and lifecycle policy management.
As with server-focused energy conservation projects, kick-start your storage energy savings by consolidating your storage infrastructure. Consolidated storage assures more efficient, centralized management and dramatic power savings, and also alleviates staffing resource and training constraints.
Certainly, when compared to DAS, the merits of consolidated networked storage are clear. Once your organization has replaced hundreds, even thousands of its under-utilized, direct attached drives with efficient and/or virtualized arrays, power consumption is greatly reduced.
In the realm of networked storage, the merits of consolidation are equally compelling. By consolidating storage into as few array frames as possible, you can reduce power drain while minimizing the performance latency that is inherent to distributed, multi-frame storage. With the emergence of storage arrays that enable ?in the box? storage tiering, users can now match storage resources to service level requirements of their key applications based on performance, availability, functionality and environmental considerations ? all from a single management interface. By leveraging policy-driven Quality of Service (QoS) technologies and mixing/matching disk drive types within an array, the benefits of consolidation and tiered storage can be achieved in tandem.
Capacity Management
The final component to realizing significant power savings is to manage overall stored capacity. Begin by conducting a ?backup audit? to identify where information is stored, where redundancies are consuming excess storage capacity, and opportunities for information consolidation. From there, choose incremental backups, snapshots, and other advanced storage technologies to slash the overall volume of data you are storing and protecting.
Single-instance archiving is another technology that can help minimize capacity needs. This capability, featured within advanced disk-based archiving platforms, maximizes storage capacity utilization and reduces the over allocation of storage and associated power demands. Similarly, emerging data de-duplication technology eliminates redundant copies of stored data, enabling up to 300:1 data reduction for backup and storage applications. By leveraging these technologies to minimize redundant data, you ?ll be well enabled to achieve additional energy savings.
Summary
Improving power efficiency is one of the largest challenges facing today ?s data center managers, particularly in large data centers or in metropolitan areas where power demand is highest and resources are being pushed to the limit. For some, it is not just about escalating utility bills, but a more foreboding threat: running out of power capacity to support growth. New solutions and strategies to help store information more intelligently can deliver significant impact as it relates to improving power efficiency, including planning tools to accurately calculate power requirements, and best practices for configuring storage systems with high capacity disks. In addition, new service offerings provide a holistic approach to assess, plan, design and build efficient data centers as well as provide recommendations for consolidation, virtualization and tiering strategies.
Start with a comprehensive assessment and project plan. Evaluate workloads and configurations to determine present and future energy consumption across data center assets, ideally both servers and storage. Other assessments should include data center capacity and utilization along with facility and energy costs.
Your goal is to lower data center and IT infrastructure costs by lowering power consumption, retiring old equipment and better utilizing existing equipment, resolving energy issues leading to downtime, and designing the data center according to industry standards and best practices. In this way, you can achieve dramatic energy savings, plus better ROI from centralized management, tiered storage, consolidation and capacity management.
By Bob Wambach is senior director, storage product marketing, EMC Corporation
source : http://www.emc.com
Rabu, 02 Juli 2008
Data Loss and Data Recovery Software
Data is usually kept or stored in media like storage hard drive, storage tapes, CD, DVD, and others like flash or USB drives. Although owners can be careful about their data, accidents can happen and data could get lost. If the loss of data means a significant impact to a business, owners have the option to go to the professionals or experts of a data recovery company to help them or purchase data recovery software and do it themselves.
Treasured photos, important notes and correspondences, school- or work-related files, customer database, records, email messages are some of the many kinds of data that people store in their computers. If any of these things become difficult or seemingly impossible to retrieve by the owner, some physical or logical damage must have happened to the storage media.
Physical damage refers to possible head crash, broken motors or tapes, dusts and scratches on disks. This usually leads to logical damage, which makes data corrupted and impossible to retrieve because the operating system cannot access or extract it.
A host of things can contribute to data loss and this includes virus attack, carelessness in managing files and folders, accidental deletion of data, damaged hardware and software, corrupted systems. Data recovery is necessary in order to bring the information back from the damages that these things have caused.
Most professional data recovery companies have their own techniques in salvaging lost files. Aside from the services they render themselves, they offer their customers a way to do things on their own, if the data loss problem is simple to address. Most of their products are advertised online via their websites. They also have articles that could help people with the data loss problems.
Data recovery solutions help end users as well as service providers recover precious data that have been lost to crashes or corruption due to physical damages on the storage media. Most companies that produce this application swear on their simplicity and how effective it is.
Data recovery software is a kind of software application that serves as a utility to recover data or file by making a run-through on the drive concerned. Tools are included to help the user evaluate the damage himself and apply the necessary recovery functions that come with the box.
A package of this software application could be the answer to a person who may want to do the recovery by himself. It is cost-effective and of course, immediately available to the user if he already has one at home and another crash happens. If the user has stock knowledge about computers and data recovery and he trusts himself to do it, then a product such as data recovery software should be a good thing.
There are a lot being offered online and the manufacturers offer different approaches. The key is to shop around first and check their feedback. It is also quite necessary that the person doing the data recovery has the technical knowledge and experience to it or more damage may result.
It is bad enough that you had data loss, it will be worst if you bought the wrong data recovery software to solve it. If the data you are tasked to recover is critical, the best option still, is to consult the experts in the field.
by Jack Link
About the Author
To learn even more about data recovery visit http://www.learndatarecovery.com/ where you will find more information about data recovery software.
Treasured photos, important notes and correspondences, school- or work-related files, customer database, records, email messages are some of the many kinds of data that people store in their computers. If any of these things become difficult or seemingly impossible to retrieve by the owner, some physical or logical damage must have happened to the storage media.
Physical damage refers to possible head crash, broken motors or tapes, dusts and scratches on disks. This usually leads to logical damage, which makes data corrupted and impossible to retrieve because the operating system cannot access or extract it.
A host of things can contribute to data loss and this includes virus attack, carelessness in managing files and folders, accidental deletion of data, damaged hardware and software, corrupted systems. Data recovery is necessary in order to bring the information back from the damages that these things have caused.
Most professional data recovery companies have their own techniques in salvaging lost files. Aside from the services they render themselves, they offer their customers a way to do things on their own, if the data loss problem is simple to address. Most of their products are advertised online via their websites. They also have articles that could help people with the data loss problems.
Data recovery solutions help end users as well as service providers recover precious data that have been lost to crashes or corruption due to physical damages on the storage media. Most companies that produce this application swear on their simplicity and how effective it is.
Data recovery software is a kind of software application that serves as a utility to recover data or file by making a run-through on the drive concerned. Tools are included to help the user evaluate the damage himself and apply the necessary recovery functions that come with the box.
A package of this software application could be the answer to a person who may want to do the recovery by himself. It is cost-effective and of course, immediately available to the user if he already has one at home and another crash happens. If the user has stock knowledge about computers and data recovery and he trusts himself to do it, then a product such as data recovery software should be a good thing.
There are a lot being offered online and the manufacturers offer different approaches. The key is to shop around first and check their feedback. It is also quite necessary that the person doing the data recovery has the technical knowledge and experience to it or more damage may result.
It is bad enough that you had data loss, it will be worst if you bought the wrong data recovery software to solve it. If the data you are tasked to recover is critical, the best option still, is to consult the experts in the field.
by Jack Link
About the Author
To learn even more about data recovery visit http://www.learndatarecovery.com/ where you will find more information about data recovery software.
An Alternative Way of Doing Social Networking: Volatile Local Networks
Fact: many small businesses have a website whose return on investment is zero.
I have worked for years developing small web applications for small businesses. Every single one of them seems to desire getting on the internet, they like the idea of billions of people being able to visit their website and contact them. They think this will boost their business.
However, I also noticed that most of those small businesses do not have the will nor the capabilities to properly market their website. Being a technical person myself, until recently I simply warned my clients that they might need quite a bit of time and effort in order to effectively market their website once it was online, otherwise it just would not make sense to build it in the first place.
I offered them some extra marketing options such as google advertising tools and article submission for a reasonable fee, but many of them refused, thinking the website alone could drive a lot of new clients to them.
Sometimes this has worked very well, but most of the times my clients refused to follow my advices.
Having observed these phenomena, I thought about a solution, which I am sure will be quite popular in the future: Volatile Local Networks.
The idea started from observing people in London (UK), where I recently moved. I see lots and lots of people going to cafes with a laptop or an iPhone and surf the internet when a wireless network is available.
So I thought that it would be great if local self employed people (those within the wireless range) could actually advertise themselves in those networks, or it could be nice that small businesses could walk into a cafe with a laptop and offer the other clients some information about their business should they want to take a look at it.
This is the basic idea of Volatile Local Networks: they are local networks in the sense that information comes from servers which are physically close to clients (servers and clients may actually reside on the same laptop or post-pc-device); they are volatile in the sense that if a person walks in a cafe with a laptop serving some content and then walks out of it, the content is available only while that person is connected. A lot of nice services may be built in this way.
Moreover, if you are a self employed with an office where people come and wait for a period of time, such as if you are a doctor or a consultant, you could offer them some information to browse while you are busy, thereby telling them about aspects of your job they might not be aware of and creating more business opportunities.
Starting from that, I have written a software for the Mac called CuriosityAndVanity that is currently free to use in order to let people try that idea, but I am sure that everyone who has the necessary experience with network programming could easily create a software like that one. I hope that soon Volatile Local Networks will be another great tool for self employed people in order to grow and prosper.
Enjoy!
About the Author
Alessandro Pistocchi is a Mac fan since 1992. His background is in mathematics, physics and computer science. He currently writes software for the Mac and iPod Touch and Ruby on Rails web applications. He can be contacted at: http://www.alessandropistocchi.com
I have worked for years developing small web applications for small businesses. Every single one of them seems to desire getting on the internet, they like the idea of billions of people being able to visit their website and contact them. They think this will boost their business.
However, I also noticed that most of those small businesses do not have the will nor the capabilities to properly market their website. Being a technical person myself, until recently I simply warned my clients that they might need quite a bit of time and effort in order to effectively market their website once it was online, otherwise it just would not make sense to build it in the first place.
I offered them some extra marketing options such as google advertising tools and article submission for a reasonable fee, but many of them refused, thinking the website alone could drive a lot of new clients to them.
Sometimes this has worked very well, but most of the times my clients refused to follow my advices.
Having observed these phenomena, I thought about a solution, which I am sure will be quite popular in the future: Volatile Local Networks.
The idea started from observing people in London (UK), where I recently moved. I see lots and lots of people going to cafes with a laptop or an iPhone and surf the internet when a wireless network is available.
So I thought that it would be great if local self employed people (those within the wireless range) could actually advertise themselves in those networks, or it could be nice that small businesses could walk into a cafe with a laptop and offer the other clients some information about their business should they want to take a look at it.
This is the basic idea of Volatile Local Networks: they are local networks in the sense that information comes from servers which are physically close to clients (servers and clients may actually reside on the same laptop or post-pc-device); they are volatile in the sense that if a person walks in a cafe with a laptop serving some content and then walks out of it, the content is available only while that person is connected. A lot of nice services may be built in this way.
Moreover, if you are a self employed with an office where people come and wait for a period of time, such as if you are a doctor or a consultant, you could offer them some information to browse while you are busy, thereby telling them about aspects of your job they might not be aware of and creating more business opportunities.
Starting from that, I have written a software for the Mac called CuriosityAndVanity that is currently free to use in order to let people try that idea, but I am sure that everyone who has the necessary experience with network programming could easily create a software like that one. I hope that soon Volatile Local Networks will be another great tool for self employed people in order to grow and prosper.
Enjoy!
About the Author
Alessandro Pistocchi is a Mac fan since 1992. His background is in mathematics, physics and computer science. He currently writes software for the Mac and iPod Touch and Ruby on Rails web applications. He can be contacted at: http://www.alessandropistocchi.com
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