In data centers around the world, power consumption is prompting economic and environmental concerns to become
common bedfellows.

It is estimated that over the past five years, the storage industry has shipped more than a hundred million disk drives that are still running today in enterprise storage systems worldwide. In 2006 alone, those drives will have consumed an estimated 60 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity at a cost of around US $6 billion. Of this cost, up to $3 billion could have been saved if every storage deployment included green, "Thin" technologies such as 3PAR Thin Provisioning, 3PAR Virtual Copy and 3PAR Remote Copy.

In a world where energy costs are not only rising, but where growing concerns are mounting with regards to sustainability, power consumption related to data storage has become serious business. Not only do we have more data to store, but rising energy costs mean that storing that data is now more expensive; and the impact to the environment is perhaps the largest price tag of all. Industry analysts and storage professionals alike are taking note.

While it is true that many enterprises are reducing energy costs and environmental impact through using larger, more efficient drives, mechanical improvements to storage arrays can only improve power consumption so much. At some point, data centers need to address the most egregious source of waste: poor capacity utilization. With average “written data” disk utilization rate estimates ranging from as little as 10-25%, more than half of the disks quietly humming away in the world’s data centers are effectively wasted. But they are not only wasted—they are also responsible for wasting valuable resources: the resources required to house, power and cool them.

For years, 3PAR has led the industry in developing green, Thin technologies to squeeze maximum efficiency out of every last disk, promoting sustainability through dramatically increasing capacity utilization and reduced energy consumption. For example, 3PAR Thin Provisioning leverages a dedicate-on-write approach to enable applications to use disk capacity only when it's actually needed, essentially halving the number of required disks. 3PAR Virtual Copy and 3PAR Remote Copy use non-duplicative, copy-on-write technology to consume and replicate minimal capacity for both local and remote copies, eliminating the copying of unchanged or empty blocks. For any given volume, the Periodic Asynchronous mode of 3PAR Remote Copy replicates only the delta change blocks between the two consecutive timestamps. Traditional technologies transmit every change to a given block even if the block is overwritten many times between timestamps. And 3PAR Virtual Copy eliminates the need to reserve large amounts of copy space on a per-volume basis when creating copies for testing, development, backup and rapid application recovery purposes.

With 3PAR, customers do not have to compromise between economic prudence and environmental friendliness. To date, 3PAR customers have allocated about 20 petabytes of usable capacity to their applications. With traditional “fat” array technologies from the SAN storage market leaders, this would have required approximately 30 petabytes of raw capacity using a mix of RAID 1 and RAID 5. Yet by leveraging 3PAR Thin technologies, our customers have achieved the same result by purchasing only 12 petabytes of raw capacity. In other words, they have saved the purchase of approximately 18 petabytes of raw capacity. Put another way, they have achieved the same business results with 60% less storage capacity. This disparity represents an annualized energy savings of approximately US $4 million for 3PAR customers worldwide. In energy terms, crude oil savings by 3PAR customers are estimated to equal roughly 74,000 barrels—enough oil to fuel nearly 4,000 cars for a full year. In environmental terms, the carbon emissions reduced by this amount of crude oil savings would equate to 32,500 tons of CO2, the equivalent emissions of more than 8,000 cars for an entire year.

Our message is simple: Think Thin. Think Green. Think 3PAR.

As you read through this issue of Plugged In, I encourage you to think about ways in which you can reduce your data center costs by improving energy consumption rates with Thin technologies.

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