Green Storage

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The Abstracts

Green Storage I: Economics, Environment, Energy and Engineering
SW Worth
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Discussions of Green Storage require understanding of fundamental concepts common to all components of a datacenter. This SNIA Tutorial covers the concepts of Economics, Environment, Energy, and Engineering that are necessary to participate in the dialogue, whether you are a manager or a hands-on I.T. professional. Wherever possible, the examples used refer to Storage, but detailed focus on Storage components and technologies is left for other SNIA Tutorials. We start with definitions of “Green” used by various groups, covering various motivations for making “Green” decisions for your organization. This requires some economic theory, but you will be rewarded with a new-found ability to explain “Cap-and-Trade” management of Carbon and “Sox” (Sulfur Oxides, not Sarbanes-Oxley!) at cocktail parties. This leads naturally to coverage of various environmental regulations and initiatives (e.g. ROHS, WEEE, Energy Star) that affect manufacturers and end-users of storage components or computers. We will quickly review basic engineering topics relevant to understanding 'Green' including stuff you may have successfully avoided, such as environmental chemistry, thermodynamics, energy vs. power, and heat transfer. Since much of the focus in I.T. is on energy costs, we’ll spend some time understanding energy supply and pricing (focused on the U.S. market), and provide some negotiating alternatives for dealing with your friendly energy suppliers. We will review current problems in data center design, including increasing computational and storage density and the resulting energy and cooling issues. All of this will come together to help guide your design process towards a better allocation of capital expenses (CapEx) and operational expenses (OpEx) to lower your TCO. Bottom-line: After this session you will be armed with the knowledge you need to be part of the Green decision-making process for your datacenter, so those pesky server-geeks don’t dominate the discussion!

Learning Objectives

Understand what various groups mean by 'Green', especially as this term relates to storage network components and systems.
Understand factors that should (or will) motivate your interest in 'Green' storage, including regulation, competition, and TCO.
Understand why 'OpEx' (Operating expenses) can outweigh 'CapEx' (Capital expense) in TCO models, and how 'Green' factors increasingly influence OpEx.

Technologies for Green Storage
Alan Yoder
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Hardware efficiencies are essential to reducing the amount of power used by storage. Equally real savings are obtained by reducing the number of copies of your data that must be made, kept and managed. This talk presents a number of technologies, ranging from thin provisioning and virtualization to flywheel UPS, that each address part of the problem, and illustrates the impact that each technology can have on your data center footprint.

Learning Objectives

Learn which technologies can help you reduce your data center footprint, data space consumption and ultimately your power consumption.
Learn which technologies yield the largest returns.
Learn which technologies work best in conjunction with other technologies

Building the Green Data Center: Towards Best Practices and Technical Considerations
Rick Bauer
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"In the United States alone, buildings account for 65% of electricity consumption, 36% of energy use, 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, 30% of raw materials use, 30% of waste output (136 million tons annually), and 12% of potable water consumption. Designing and building green data centers can have a significant impact on the environment and a company's bottom line. A green data center is a repository for the storage, management, and dissemination of data in which the mechanical, lighting, electrical and computer systems are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact. The green data center has moved from the theoretical to the realistic, with IT leaders being challenged to construct new data centers (or retrofit existing ones) with energy saving features, sustainable materials, and other environmental efficiencies in mind. This tutorial will survey the wide variety of options and issues that the data center designer must keep in mind in these matters, as well as illustrate how government regulation and certification will be affecting the data centers of the future. Analysis will include the US Green Building Council LEED standard, as well as other regulatory standards that are driving green data center construction.”

Learning Objectives

"The construction and operation of a green data center includes advanced technologies and strategies. Learning Objective #1 is to identify and describe 10 different technology options for a builder to consider.”
Delineation of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental design (LEED) Green Guilding Rating System. LEED is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. LEED gives building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings performance. LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality.
Highlight other considerations to keep in mind with designing and building green data centers, and the assembly of a "best practices" resource link for Green Construction on the SNIA Green Storage initiative website.

Green Storage II: Metrics and Measurements
Erik Riedel
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This tutorial will cover storage-specific topics related to energy-efficiency and outline the current state of the industry. We will discuss a range of technologies that are currently considered “green storage.” We will discuss metrics for measuring, managing and designing for power in storage systems. We will also briefly outline ongoing efforts in the SNIA Green Storage TWG and in partnership with other industry groups, including an overview of SNIA Idle Power Measurement Specification.

Learning Objectives

Understand the storage-specific aspects of “green”(especially energy and power) for storage components and aggregated products (e.g. arrays, controllers, appliances)
Outline considerations in how to measure and model storage energy and power
Understand the technologies to reduce the ongoing energy costs of reliably maintaining data

Holistic Approach to Optimizing Energy Efficient data Storage
William Mottram
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There is no magic bullet to eliminating the glutinous power appetite of data centers but there are many technologies that are maturing in data storage that when effectively integrated can optimize power efficiency. This presentation looks holistically at the technologies that contribute to data center energy efficiencies and how they balance efficiencies with delivering the necessary QoS performance. The discussion starts with the heightened awareness for environmentally efficient data storage. The discussion will then focus on device level architectural contributions; lower speed drives, smaller FF drives, MAID plus variations, capacity optimization techniques such as thin provisioning, compression, data-dedup,SSD for power efficiency and performance. The story continues beyond physical device boundaries to include data classification, consolidation, virtualization, ILM storage, tiering--all techniques and technologies that can drive energy efficiencies and be positioned as integrated and effective solutions to energy efficiency rather than disparate point solutions.

Learning Objectives

Efficient data storage starts with understanding your data and managing the storage of data to its usage patterns.
Learn to look at green strategies as a whole and not disparate point solutions.
There is no magic bullet - energy efficiencies is an ongoing process