Store it in a new way: green way

Green storage refers to a broad spectrum of solutions ranging from sheer hardware efficiency to more application-level software
IT has already made inroads into controlling energy costs associated with servers and to achieve such goals it is chanting the Green mantra everywhere and the latest is Green storage technologies such as virtualization, thin provisioning, deduplication and disk technologies that can significantly reduce the power and cooling costs in a data center Most storage technologies being marketed as green today are really technologies designed to improve storage utilization, which enables organizations to store their data on fewer disk drives and, in turn, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), as well as power and cooling requirements.
Ever since data centers are the largest energy consumers in most organizations, they have understandably become a focal point for trying to reduce energy costs. Yet, while storage is part of the data center, it has escaped much of this intense focus so far. This is primarily due to the growing number of high-density servers in the data center during the past several years, which have naturally captured the most attention as organizations seek to resolve the most glaring power and cooling issues. Furthermore, responsibility for data center power and cooling costs has traditionally resided within the corporate facilities budget-meaning that many data center managers are neither directly responsible for, nor at times even aware of, the costs that they generate.
Storage Solutions that currently marketed as green are mainly divided into two sections, technologies that increase storage utilization, enabling users to store more data with fewer disk drives and include technologies and solutions that directly reduce power and/or cooling costs or are inherently green. Technologies that fall into the first category make the easiest business case. These are technologies that organizations should be using anyway, if available, because they directly and immediately save resources. Technologies in the second category are specifically targeted to address the power and cooling issues for storage rather than providing power and cooling benefits as a byproduct of something else. Technologies that increase storage utilization rates are considered green because they help users to store more data with fewer disk drives, an efficiency that automatically reduces power and cooling requirements.
Storage virtualization
This is the ability to present a file, volume or storage device in such a way that its physical complexity is hidden, and the application and the storage administrator see a pool of available resources instead of separate silos of dedicated storage.
Thin provisioning
Thin provisioning (TP) is a method of optimizing the efficiency with which the available space is utilized in storage area networks (SAN). TP operates by allocating disk storage space in a flexible manner among multiple users, based on the minimum space required by each user at any given time.
Thin-provisioning-aware replication
Thin-provisioning-aware replication (sometimes called thin replication) enhances remote replication capabilities so that only the allocated space to which users have written data is transmitted to the secondary site.
Data reduction techniques
Whether they are called file-level single instance store (SIS), data deduplication, data compression or redundant file elimination, the intent of data reduction techniques is to reduce the amount of capacity needed to store a given amount of information. It is especially useful in backup or archiving scenarios. Backup, for example, tends to be a particularly wasteful activity. Often, the data change rate is less than 10% of new and modified files per week. This means that the weekly full backups are sending and storing at least 90% unnecessary data, in addition to the redundancies in data throughout the week. Gartner considers data reduction a transformational technology and rates it as one of the fastest deployed storage technologies that the market has seen in more than a decade.
Boot from Storage Area Network (SAN)
This reduces the need for internal disk drives in servers (especially in rack server and blade server environments), by allowing the boot image to reside in the SAN. It also improves server reliability (no disks) and server availability (again, because there are no disks), and it helps in rapid server imaging. When coupled with thin provisioning and thin-provisioning-aware replication, multiple boot images can be stored with great space efficiency.
Quality of Service
These optimize the use of disk storage system resources by implementing user-defined policies and/or adaptive algorithms to maximize application performance while minimizing back-end storage costs. Quality of Service (QoS) storage features improved performance and throughput using a variety of techniques, including cache partitioning and binding, and input/output (I/O) prioritization. It also has the potential to improve service-level agreements (SLAs) because more data can economically be stored online. QoS storage features also provide cost savings when coupled with virtualization.
Inherently green storage technologies
While efforts to develop technologies specifically designed to reduce power consumption or cooling requirements are in their infancy from a storage hardware perspective, there are some storage solutions on the market that are inherently green. These technologies should be evaluated for their potential benefit in an organization's specific environment and considered when making purchase decisions where those benefits are judged to be high.
Massive Arrays of Idle Disks
Massive Arrays of Idle Disks (MAIDs) store data on a large group of disk drives that can be spun down when not in use. It can also be used to spin down disks (and save power and cooling costs) during non business hours in companies that do not run a 24/7 operation, or as a third tier of storage. New and future MAID implementations may incorporate intelligent power management (IPM) techniques that allow different degrees of spin-down to increase the user's options for power savings and response times. The three IPM levels include heads unloaded, heads unloaded and drive slowed to 4,000 rpm, and sleep mode/power on, where the drives stop spinning altogether. In addition to power and cooling savings, MAID and IPM approaches can also prolong the lives of disk drives. Combined with data reduction techniques, such as data deduplication, MAID storage provides a compelling green storage solution.
Small form factor disk drives
These are 2.5-inch hard drives that, in addition to increasing storage spindle density per square foot, reduce the number of voltage conversions within the system because they require less voltage than today's 3.5-inch-high rpm disk drives.
Airflow-enhanced cabinetry
A focus in the server environment for several years, this has begun to show up more in storage disk arrays. These designs do nothing to improve capacity, utilization or performance. Rather, they are designed to improve cooling, with the goal of positively affecting power and cooling issues (such as data center configuration) and costs.
Although the concept is really promising, this technology is highly complex and may require delicate tuning to achieve true energy savings. For example, difficulty in accurately predicting idle periods can result in disks spinning up soon after they were spun down, resulting in less energy conservation than anticipated. Furthermore, there may be risks that drive mechanics will become less reliable with repeated spinning up and spinning down. In the absence of conclusive evidence that proves the long-term feasibility of turning off disk drives, customers are hesitant to adopt such technologies in haste. But keep in mind that the Environmental issues are gaining serious commercial momentum and, fueled by the growing number of local and global green initiatives, they are rising ever more insistently up the corporate agenda.