Six Storage Guidelines for a Greener Data Center
1) Control Your Redundant Data. Use block or bit level deduplication to cut down on redundant data. File level deduplication is less effective at improving storage utilization. Delta differencing is an efficient means of reducing redundant data when employing back-up operations. Delta differencing provides block level backup that only saves new changes since the last backup instead of creating a whole new file.

2) Change Your (Corporate) Behaviour. Implementing simple changes in corporate behavior such as utilizing data compression can help control increasing data stores. Understand, however, that compression can have an impact on storage performance. One must sacrifice performance to gain physical storage efficiency.

3) Put Your Data Where it Belongs. Many data centers have moved to a tiered architecture. For those who have, it’s no secret that some disks are more expensive than others. Because of the variability in price, different types of storage are used for different types of data. Ideally, the tier of storage should correlate with performance requirements specified by customers in order to meet their SLA needs.

While Solid State Disk (SSD) provides tremendous performance gains, it comes with a hefty price tag. Moving highly accessed business critical data to Solid State Disk (SSD) increases efficiency. Other data should be allocated to primary (spinning disk) storage whenever possible. Distribute all other data to lower cost tiers according to their access patterns.

With multiple tiers of storage, you gain efficiency, however you also increase management costs. Look for solutions that have automated management software included, to help you understand how much SSD you need to optimize your application. Automated management is useful in overcoming the complexity of data management, allowing the customer to view a pool of storage, and allowing the disk subsystem to logically optimize the utilization of storage.

4) Virtualize Your Storage. Rather than having pools of storage directly assigned to individual servers, consolidate your storage into a SAN, and allow the storage devices to allocate space to a wide variety of servers. Virtualized servers allow for more efficient server utilization. Storage virtualization consolidates resource to avoid ‘islands of storage’.

Allowing storage to reside on a server needlessly is wasteful when other servers do not have the necessary storage resources to optimize applications. The name of the game is eliminating wasted/underutilized capacity. Storage virtualization better distributes storage between servers for a more effective approach. Storage virtualization also opens the door for technologies such as thin-provisioning which are used to improve utilization, but can result in management overhead.

5) The Virtualized Daily Double. Going to a fully virtualized data center carries huge green potential as far as reducing the amount of total hardware. Virtualized servers and virtualized storage taken collectively represent a power play in the data center. Server virtualization has a huge impact on the number of physical servers needed to run various applications, and virtualized storage reduces hardware requirements and enhances capacity management capabilities.

6) Replace Legacy Equipment with Energy Efficient Alternatives. The greenest implementation possible is to run all the preceding guidelines on energy efficient storage platforms. This can be advantageous from a performance and capacity play as well. Extremely dense storage solutions exist that provide high capacity, while the sheer numbers of spindles provide unprecedented performance gains.

Because of their compact efficient design these solutions can provide a 50-80% power and cooling reduction with similar performance and capacity compared to legacy systems. It also occupies less real estate, which means storing more data in significantly less space.