Footing the bill
Another reason is that, until recently, power supply issues were not the concern of CIOs because the power bills were sent to the facilities manager. Yet as data mountains continue to grow, and the IT department is increasingly held accountable for financial goals, decision-makers have had to change the way they view data management and power costs.
“Data growth is not going to stop – it’s a curse of the way we do business these days,” Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) director solutions and consulting, Michael Cunningham, said.
“Nearly all information is created digitally so growth is going to continue inexorably but we can tackle it with things like virtualisation, de-duplication and better data management policies. For example, understanding that a company report created 10 years ago probably doesn’t need to be backed up every day and probably doesn’t need to be replicated across a country or to a new site in real-time. Those management regimes will come into play.
“I’d love to be able to say that power will always be available but ultimately the way we manage and store data at the moment is not going to cope with expected growth in data.”
And while new technologies will come into play – including atomic force microscopy, scanning tunnel microscopy and holographic storage – Cunningham said they are still under development and yet to come to the fore.
“At some point in the future you won’t be storing data on hard-disk drives anymore; it’ll be in a solid-state form which will have corresponding benefits for power and cooling as well.”
NEC Australia business manager for data and mobility, Alex Grande, said while the issue played nicely into the green IT trend, the industry had generally overlooked it in the past.
“We never really sat down and had a look at what the issues were in terms of power consumption and all that,” he said. “We’re now more conscious that the data side of the business is growing very fast and we need to find a way to minimise the impact from a power point of view.”
