Southern and Northern California, and the New England Corridor) may soon spread to new geographies, including the Midwest.


The Importance of Gaining Usage Data The consideration of power


efficiency has many moving parts. The most obvious starting point in any evaluation of the current state of (in)efficiency is to collect data. Every company should be collecting data on real power consumption: at the system level, rack level, and infrastructure (HVAC) level. This is baseline data required to predict and evaluate the impact of power cost containment strategies. Gaining power usage data requires instrumentation. For guidance on how best to gather the data, a good starting point is your utility company. As counterintuitive as that may seem (they want to sell more energy, after all), there are standing programs in many utility power companies today to aid consumers in reducing their power demands. In a few cases, they deliver measurement services free of charge or at a minimal cost.


Arm Yourself with the Facts With baseline data in hand, data


storage planners are in a better position to discuss power issues with vendors. When evaluating equipment for acquisition, data center energy efficiency arguments should be tested as a condition of the contract. Understanding that a new array generally consumes less power than a fully burdened workhorse, the impact of the deployment of a system on overall energy consumption needs to be tested and measured. In general, newer arrays that


leverage flash solid-state drives (SSD) as read caches (not as write targets) to augment disk performance deliver better power economics than do array architectures that use hundreds of parallelized disk platters, or worse yet “short-stroked” disks, to achieve performance. Short-stroking a disk uses only a few tracks of each media surface to reduce read-write head movement and, by extension, to improve I/O performance; however, the platter motor must nonetheless


IMAGES © ANTISHOCK, VLASTIMIL ŠESTÁK / FOTOLIA CONNECTION/BUSINESS IT 2012.Q3 13


spin the entire surface. Going to SSD- assisted arrays may have a meaningful impact on the power demands of your performance storage.


Take a Closer Look at Your Storage Situation This is the idea behind a metric


that some folks are calling IOPS per watt. Optimizing IOPS per watt should be a guiding principle when building “capture storage,” storage sporting sufficient performance to handle the read/write requirements of your most demanding business applications. In most organizations,


approximately 70% of the data stored on performance or capture storage doesn’t need to be there at all. Approximately 40% on average of the data stored on disk is of archival quality and very rarely re-referenced. This is especially the case for most user files, which tend never to be re-referenced after 30 to 90 days. This suggests that a second class of


storage, call it retention storage, may be needed to store low-access data. Given the usage parameters of the files being stored, a solution like tape network- attached storage (NAS) may provide just what the doctor ordered: high capacity, reasonable access speed and extremely low power consumption. The power efficiency of such a retention storage platform can be measured in terms of capacity per watt. The bottom line is that making


power considerations part of the criteria used to build a data storage


How Healthy Is Your Storage?


Optimize Your Storage Investment with a Healthcheck Managing your organization’s data is an ever-present challenge. As the amount of data your users create continues to grow, so does the need for a storage environment that operates at maximum efficiency. PC Connection’s Storage Healthcheck Service is available to help you optimize your initial investment and get the most out of your existing storage approach. Designed to review your current storage infrastructure and analyze its performance and capacity utilization, our service delivers the facts you need to make informed investment decisions. A Healthcheck helps your organization reduce costs, shorten backup/recovery times, and improve overall operational efficiency.


Call your Account Manager to schedule a Storage Healthcheck today! 1.800.800.0014 www.pcconnection.com/storagehealthcheck


infrastructure is the foundation of a power efficiency strategy. IOPS per watt and capacity per watt are metrics that can help you determine (and communicate to management) the value of the strategy you adopt to economize on power.


Self-Test for Job Protection Power efficiency isn’t just about right-sizing storage to address utility energy costs. It’s about ensuring that clean and consistent energy is provided to power the storage infrastructure to prevent unwanted downtime. Several studies indicate that power issues play a significant role in business interruptions, which have been estimated to occur with surprising frequency. In a recent survey, respondents reported experiencing an average of 5.12 power-related data center outages in the past two years, each lasting an average of an hour and 46 minutes at a cost of $5,600 per minute. Power efficiency also means


reducing power-related downtime, so now is the time to refresh your knowledge of how power supplies are protected in your data center, including surge protection, uninterruptible power supplies (batteries) and self- generation capabilities. Even if you think you’re on top of the challenge, perform a self-test on the gear you’ve deployed. It may save your job.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36