Mobiledevices such as smart phones and tablet computers have enabled consumers to keep connected and active wherever they go. These devices are dependent upon services and applications that are
Data Center (Photo credit: bandarji)
supported by on-line data centers. On-line data centers are increasing their capacity to deal with this increased demand for processing power, communication speeds and digital storage capacity but despite the increases in efficiency of enterprise equipment and software there is a price to pay for universal connectivity and general on-line resources.
There are governmental and non-governmental plans to increase broadband availability in many parts of the world. Faster and more ubiquitous connectivity will stimulate the fast paced growth of data centers that handle this traffic and the applications that this traffic serves. Currently the data center portion of the total energy consumed in developed countries is in the neighborhood of 2-3% but the rapid pace of on-line equipment growth will drive this to 10% or higher in a few years time.
Some resources, such as digital storage, are actually more expensive in the cloud than their local equivalent. This is true even though technologies such as virtualization, deduplication, intelligent storage tiering and more recently software defined storage allow more efficient utilization of storage hardware. Continuing to reduce the costs of on-line storage will require the management of stored content to optimize availability depending upon frequency of use and use of commodity storage and other data center equipment.
These storage technologies reduce the $/GB and $/IOPS price from what it would be otherwise but the biggest driver for the use of lower cost on-line storage is that it enables other on-line services. On-line storage is behind remote backup and disaster recovery, on-line content sharing and video streaming, among many other applications currently popular with mobile as well as home-based smart connected devices.
In order to enable the continued growth of on-line data center services we need to work on three important areas. First, we must include data center expansion in power management and growth plans (this is in addition to other demands for a smart power grid to support activities such as charging a possible expansion of the number of electric vehicles). Second, we must look at ways to further improve the efficiency and reduce the power load of storage and other enterprise equipment. Third, we need more responsive storage system software that provides the lowest cost (and hopefully lower overall power load) for an application.
The first area, planning for the expansion of power generating capacity, is beyond the scope of this piece but the second and third is not. Let’s look at the second area. There is a clear movement to lower power processors in many enterprise systems (e.g. ARM processors and GPUs), including storage systems, to reduce power requirements. Also intelligent storage layering with flash memory used for high performance content delivery can result in HDD storage used more for content storage rather than high performance, and thus providing a relative cost savings. Also modern enterprise storage technology, whether it is flash memory, HDDs or magnetic tape include new power saving features to minimize the costs of storage. The HDD companies, Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba are participating in better management of storage device energy use, as are flash manufacturers such as SanDisk, Samsung and Toshiba and many flash based storage equipment suppliers such as Skyera, Smart Storage Systems and Virident.
Software defined storage (SDS) is a recent technology term used to describe an enhanced level of storage management and placement. Companies such as Coraid are supporting SDS and Kevin Brown, Coraid CEO recently said that “SDS is ideally suited for cloud environments that need scalable, flexible, and automated storage operations to support their dynamic application requirements. As cloud-style architectures become more prevalent, we will see a parallel shift from legacy storage to modern, software-defined-storage architectures.” Other storage management software that allows better data protection and access include that offered by Amplidata.
The growth of on-line content enables new and lucrative future businesses. Digital storage is a key component in the build out and management of on-line data centers. Digital storage hardware and software will play an important role in providing the level of services and performance that consumers are expecting while controlling both the cost and energy use of the required data centers. Innovation follows these opportunities and we look forward to see where that takes us in the development of digital storage hardware and software.
