Green IT: Storage Matters

Information Week has an article on storage’s effect on a green data center.

Green IT Beyond Virtualization: Storage Matters

We save more and more stuff, drives get bigger and bigger, yet we must keep buying more disks to keep pace. Meanwhile, energy costs are through the roof. We can't go on like this.

By Behzad Behtash
InformationWeek
November 8, 2008 12:01 AM (From the November 10, 2008 issue)

Second of a three-part series

Is it time to do something radical with your storage infrastructure? Encouraging users to conserve space isn't working. For every conscientious employee who deletes files as defined by policy, three more are charter members of the "keep everything forever" club.

Maybe IT can't do much about these hoarders. But given the need to comply with industry and governmental regulations and, for many, a data storage volume increasing by 50% or more per year with the attendant expenditures on utilities, it's clear something must give.

If you maintain branch offices, as do the majority of the 560 business technology professionals who answered our recent InformationWeekAnalytics survey on business continuity, it may be time to seriously consider consolidation of the storage infrastructure--data center, branches, and disaster recovery sites, everywhere data resides.

While consolidation might have been impractical just 18 months ago, technology that enables consolidation is now better, faster and less expensive, and options such as cloud storage can help as well.

In this second installment in our series of three articles focused on ways to improve the efficiency of IT operations, reduce your overall environmental footprint, lower ongoing expenses, and generally be more green, we'll examine these questions.