Opinion: Storage vendors, users forced to be energy conscience
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Storage administrators, if they aren't already, will become very conscious of the electricity consumed and heat generated by legions of spinning disks because storage vendors will make it a competitive issue.
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'We didn't say that' Dell has been rumbling about "changing the economics" of data center storage for months, but little has slipped out, until now, in terms of a method for such madness.â¦
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Or at least neutralizes their hype The Storage Performance Council (SPC) has issued a second benchmark meant to save customers from vendor spin hell.â¦
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The reality is that thanks to abundant cheap disk space, we've become storage gluttons and are desperately playing catch-up in areas such as indexing and classification.
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A recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies shows that if you're not using disk-to-disk systems to cut your backup window, you're behind the times. Here's why the technology is so hot.
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Surging data center power usage is building to a potential crisis, but there are many steps that IT managers can take today to start reducing power consumption without making a huge investment -- or sacrificing performance or availability.
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By Dubie, Denise  Getting rid of obsolete computer gear isn't as simple as it used to be. The threat of data loss, coupled with increasingly stringent environmental regulations, has IT pros rethinking their disposal methods.
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Vendor uncertainty and instability is highly correlated to perceived risk, and there are some big storage vendors out there with some large question marks hanging around their necks, including Sun, Symantec and HP.
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(InfoWorld) - A group of some of the biggest technology companies said they've committed to a plan to improve the power efficiency of equipment they make and use. The Climate Savers Computing Initiative , which includes companies such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., aims to improve the efficiency of power sources for computers and servers and encourage end users to take advantage of underused power management techniques. Only about 50 percent of the power that leaves a power outlet reaches a PC, because inefficient power cords leak energy, Google's Senior Vice President of Operations, Urs Holzle said Tuesday during a press conference to announce the program. Climate Savers has defined a series of standards for power supply efficiency in servers and PCs that it suggests members adopt between now and July 2010. By 2010, the Climate Savers standard will define a power supply that is above 95 percent efficient, Holzle said. The program asks manufacturing members to build products to the standard and companies to pledge to buy products that have the improved power supplies. The improvement doesn't require the development of new technologies. "This is all do-able today with technology we have and know," Holzle said. The reason that vendors haven't deployed such efficient power cords is because they cost more, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group. A PC with a more efficient power cord would cost around US$20 more and a server an additional $30, he said. To address that price premium, Climate Savers is encouraging energy companies to issue rebates to users that buy products with the more efficient power supplies. Over time that cost premium is expected to drop with volume production, Gelsinger said. In addition, end users will save on their energy bills, also helping to offset the cost, he noted. Another component of Climate Savers is general education and encouragement for end users to take advantage of power management mechanisms that are typically built into existing PCs. "Ninety percent of PCs are capable but aren't utilizing power management techniques," Gelsinger said. "We want to drive IT policy in enterprises," he said. Improving power supply efficiencies and the use of power management techniques along the timeline Climate Savers has described would reduce global carbon emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons per year. It would save 62 billion kilowatt hours of energy in 2010, worth around $5.5 billion in energy costs, the group said. In its own data centers, most of Google's servers already have power supplies that comply with the Climate Savers standards for 2008 and 2009, Holzle said. Google began investing in the more expensive supplies because "it's worth spending a bit more on the power supply to save on the energy bill," he said. He defended Google's overall carbon footprint, despite questions about company jets that are hard on the environment. He pointed to the solar power used at the company's headquarters and incentives for employees to buy hybrid cars. In addition, he hinted at future energy-saving programs that the company plans to announce soon. Although Holzle said he knows Google's carbon footprint, he declined to share it. Other companies that are already part of the program include Yahoo Inc., Hitachi Ltd., eBay Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., NEC Corp., Red Hat Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., Unisys Corp. and the Linux Foundation.
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While adding a lot of cost to the system, for some mobile users, solid-state storage is a compelling alternative to traditional hard drives.
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New industry standard should offer cooler, quieter systems--so why isn't anybody rushing to embrace it?
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Some attendees at the Storage Networking World conference say they're combining backup software and de-duplication technology with virtual systems in an effort to manage ever increasing data stores.
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It&#39;s hard to argue against data portability. After all, who could oppose giving people control over the data they load, publish, and store on Web sites?This is particularly timely now that average users have started feeling the &quot;network fatigue&quot; that comes from maintaining multiple social-networking profiles, e-mail accounts, blogs, address book applications, social-news-sites memberships, and the like.And yet, while it is an important and unquestionably worthy endeavor, data portability faces thorny challenges in such areas as technology, privacy, security, business, and regulation and legislation.An informed and articulate discussion of these challenges can be found on the online forum of the DataPortability Workgroup, an organization founded recently to highlight the work that multiple data portability groups have been doing and to create a technical blueprint for vendors to adopt.While the workgroup has about 50 formal members, anyone can join the discussion forum, which now has more than 700 participants and is the workgroup&#39;s main meeting place.Activity on the forum has been engaging in recent weeks as people discuss technical and nontechnical issues, offer up suggestions, ask questions, argue and, mostly, cheer each other on in their collective quest for a satisfactory data portability solution.More than 400 discussion threads have been started, as participants ponder what are the parameters for user data, what data portability truly means, who owns data already created for a specific site, and whether making data portable is illegal in Europe.Other threads focus on how to bring together various data portability efforts already under way, like the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), OpenID , Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML), the Liberty Alliance, and various open data microformats.Despite the magnitude of the endeavor, participants interviewed feel optimistic that the workgroup will yield concrete results that will bring about industry-wide implementations of data portability solutions.&quot;Where there is a will, there&#39;s a way. And so far it seems like everyone has thrown their will behind the project. Now they need to find a way,&quot; said Chris Saad, cofounder of the DataPortability Workgroup.The DataPortability Workgroup positions itself at a higher conceptual level than the groups working to develop specific technical standards for data portability.&quot;Our goal is to highlight, not compete [with], the work of other groups and to encourage the adoption of their work with vendors and users,&quot; Saad said.The workgroup&#39;s main accomplishment so far, Saad said, is that it brought people to the table and started to outline the documents it plans to deliver, chief among which will be the DataPortability Technical Blueprint, envisioned as a key reference document for a complete implementation architecture for the data portability stack of standards.John Breslin is a workgroup supporter who sees it as having a lot of synergy with the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC), which he founded in 2004 to provide methods for interconnecting discussion services such as blogs, forums, and mailing lists to each other.&quot;SIOC is a data format essentially to describe communities. It has many different possible applications, of which data portability is one,&quot; Breslin, a lecturer and researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of the National University of Ireland in Galway, said in a phone interview.Victor Coustenoble shares a similar belief. He co-founded the OSocial.net project with Edwin Taylor to let people see their social-networking data in an open, portable way and let them securely build a friends list across site boundaries without the need for new registrations.&quot;About our participation, we are very interested to implement and use data portability ideas and specifications. It helps us to write applications easily for data management with standards and with a community support, which is very important for us,&quot; Coustenoble said.For Devin Holloway, the workgroup could yield historic results. He plans to move from Silicon Valley to Asia to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities where social networks, mobile phones and Internet technologies intersect.&quot;[Data portability] will pave the way for a future rich in services and applications that harness our aggregate data to help improve our lives in virtually every aspect. The [workgroup] is onto something that is going to change the world, and I&#39;m excited to be a part of the process,&quot; he said.Unfortunately, the enthusiasm, commitment, and passion displayed by participants, many of whom are acting as individual volunteers, hasn&#39;t so far been replicated by the major Internet players.While the decisions by Google and Facebook to become members put the workgroup in a news spotlight, their representatives don&#39;t seem to have yet participated in the forum discussions. Google and Facebook also declined to have their workgroup representatives be interviewed for this article. Each separately sent a brief, prepared statement saying that they want to participate in the group because they&#39;re committed to data portability.This isn&#39;t new. The CEOs of both companies at different times have said that their companies believe in data portability, and yet, neither them nor any other major Internet company can be said to have taken a leadership role in this effort.&quot;I haven&#39;t seen anything convincing from the big Internet companies that illustrates that they want to embrace this wholeheartedly,&quot; Breslin said. &quot;These sites haven&#39;t really been rushing to make their data portable yet.&quot;&quot;We are yet to see if they are fully committed. So far they have only committed to the conversation,&quot; said Saad, who is also CEO of Faraday Media in Australia and cofounder of the APML Workgroup. &quot;That being said, however, it&#39;s encouraging to see them take the first few steps in the right direction,&quot;This isn&#39;t a minor point. The DataPortability Workgroup and the other technical organizations could come up with fantastic solutions, but if the major Internet players -- and in particular the major social-networking sites -- don&#39;t adopt them, data portability will not become a reality for end-users. MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Bebo did not reply to requests for comment for this story.Maybe these Internet companies aren&#39;t truly convinced that data portability will be good for their businesses. In what some viewed as an example of words being inconsistent with actions, Facebook recently booted from its social network the well-known technology blogger Robert Scoble.Scoble&#39;s crime? He exported his contacts data in his Facebook account over to Plaxo&#39;s address book management service, Pulse. No can do, Facebook said, explaining that Plaxo&#39;s tool violated Facebook&#39;s terms of service and posed a security risk because it &quot;scraped&quot; the data from the social network. Scoble&#39;s account was later reinstated, but under the condition he doesn&#39;t do this again.If you operate a social-networking site -- or any site where people create an account or profile, list contacts and post content -- a way to discourage them from switching to a competitor is to make it hard or impossible for them to easily export and reuse that data elsewhere.Yet proponents of data portability like Saad say that things are starting to change, and that Facebook, MySpace, Google, and others need to wise up if they don&#39;t want to fall into disfavor with their users.What has changed is that these &quot;social&quot; sites have reached mainstream status, and a critical mass of users have realized the inconvenience of having to reenter and update a lot of the same information and content in multiple &quot;social&quot; sites and applications.&quot;As more and more applications start to feel the impact of social features, users will begin to demand a data portability solution. Either that or network fatigue will reduce adoption and eventually kill the fun,&quot; Saad said.For example, a concrete result of data portability could be a console-like management application where a person could manage his address book contacts, photos, videos, social news entries, social bookmarks and blog posts. With that application, the user would be able to share data between multiple social applications, sites and services.Unlike other vendors, Plaxo is heavily involved in data portability discussions and efforts precisely because its Pulse service has been designed to help people manage their dispersed contacts data across address books, sites, and e-mail accounts.&quot;By making data portable, you&#39;re enabling all these tools to work together. The user can be the hub and the different services can be spokes. That&#39;s what we&#39;re pushing for: Users in control of the data and interoperability among the services,&quot; said Joseph Smarr, Plaxo&#39;s chief platform architect.Ultimately, the problem represents an opportunity for Internet companies. &quot;In the end, whoever moves first to be truly open will have the advantage,&quot; Saad said.J. Trent Adams, founder and chief innovator at Matchmine, another vendor pushing for data portability, concurs. A stealthy startup could develop a clever application or service built on data portability standards and force other vendors to respond. &quot;All of a sudden, it&#39;s the right idea, and the big boys will have to react,&quot; Adams said.In other words, Internet companies who insist on locking up their users&#39; data to protect their businesses might soon find themselves instead stuck in the mud.
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TechWeb - Customers are decoupling storage from server purchases, which explains why EMC and NetApp earnings were up and why Sun and HP were flat or down, Warmenhoven says.
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Cisco Systems wants to turn the enterprise data network into an electricity meter.Using open standards, the company wants to get server and storage vendors to collect and share information about their equipment and send it to Cisco routers and switches. The data could include power consumption, operating temperature and more. It&#39;s becoming a critical job, and because the network touches all IT resources across the enterprise, data collection should happen there, according to Paul Marcoux, vice president of green engineering.Marcoux joined Cisco from American Power Conversion only about six weeks ago after Cisco created the position to overlook energy issues across all parts of the company. Networking gear itself makes up a much smaller portion of IT power consumption than do servers or storage, but Cisco plans to go beyond just making its own products more efficient.Power is a growing issue in datacenters as the cost of energy rises and concerns about global climate change increase. Being able to collect and analyze information about power usage is a big part of the battle and becoming more crucial in the age of virtualization, according to Marcoux. Distributing storage and processing cycles without regard for power issues is not just inefficient, it&#39;s dangerous, he said.If virtualization software looks at a process that requires more computing power or storage space, then enlists servers or storage devices that are near to overheating or running out of power, it could send a rack of servers over the edge and shut it down, Marcoux said. For that reason, the virtualization system needs to know the power status of all the resources it may call upon, he said.By the same token, consolidated datacenters typically serve many departments of an enterprise and consume a lot of power, but those groups generally don&#39;t have to pay for their part of the power. In fact, the electricity bill often bypasses even the IT department, going to building management instead, Marcoux said. Collecting data about the power consumed by each device, and eventually by individual transactions, would allow enterprises to bill each department for the power it uses, he said.Software on routers and switches would collect the information and then take actions or forward it on to separate building management, energy management or virtualization control systems, Marcoux said. Given the large amount of energy data to be processed, Cisco may introduce daughtercards for its platforms to provide extra computing power, he said. He hopes the technology will be in place and collecting information in enterprises within three years.Because datacenters contain gear from so many vendors, open standards are the only way to make such a system work, according to Cisco. Fortunately, there already are several available standards, Marcoux said. Having standards already in place will help speed up adoption, Marcoux said.&quot;We&#39;re not trying to reinvent the wheel, we&#39;re just trying now to utilize the wheel,&quot; Marcoux said.Cisco&#39;s proposal would represent a whole new role for networks beyond communications, said Burton Group analyst Dave Passmore. Server vendors might go along with the plan, but Cisco can&#39;t count on smooth sailing, he said. Centralized power regulation would play a role in overall management of the datacenter, an area where Cisco is attempting to make inroads with other initiatives as well.&quot;Who controls virtualization in the data center is going to be the new battleground,&quot; Passmore said.
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Underpromising in order to overdeliver can't make up for sluggish operating results.
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Users at Storage Networking World are developing information life-cycle management schemes within their storage networks to more efficiently and cost-effectively store data according to business policies.