Green Storage #4 – Your power saving strategy should include tape - Around the Storage Block Blog -
Around the Storage Block Blog » Green Storage #4 – Your power saving strategy should include tape
Green Storage #4 – Your power saving strategy should include tape
- by David Garrels  

We’ve talked in this blog before about how much power spinning disks use as being the biggest driver of storage power consumption.  And we’ve discussed ways to minimize the number of spinning disks.  Now, let’s talk about how much power you can save if you get the data off of disk and on to tape.  

Everyone wants to keep every bit of information they create “in case they need it later”.    But with archive restrictions and requirements, and with the cost of electricity to keep multiple copies of data spinning on disk drives, there is a real opportunity to archive data off the primary array storage.    

There are two primary options of where to archive data: disk (Virtual Tape Libs or Disk2Disk backup) or tape.  There are trade-offs around time to recovery – it’s obviously quicker to pull data off disk.  And there is a real opportunity for power savings if you archive to tape.  In fact, the Clipper Group has compared tape and disk archiving and says tape archives have lifetime ownerships 23 times less and a near 290X energy advantage over archiving to disk.    

Of course it’s a trade-off of access time and power savings, so you need to evaluate both. But anyone looking at a power saving project, should make sure to look at tape as an important and tangible way to reduce the power needed to store data.  

The Clipper Group paper, “Disk and Tape Square Off Again – Tape Remains King of the Hill with LTO-4,” is available for download from http://www.ultrium.com/whitepapers. A companion webcast, hosted by Reine and Kahn, is available for archived viewing at www.ultrium.com.  Take a look at it as part of your Green Storage project.

 

Posted 06-05-2008 3:08 AM by DGarrels
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