40 percent of data center utility power is consumed by servers 37 percent of data center utility power is consumed by data storage equipment 23 percent of data center utility power is consumed by network equipment

Why is so much storage equipment required by organizations?  The research suggests that we are witnessing a data explosion, with data growing exponentially at a rate of between 30 and 120 percent per year depending on the analyst one reads. 

These numbers, too, are skewed by many factors.  For one, leading analyst houses are commercial entities that often report data that their paying clients, disk array manufacturers in this case, pay them to report.  Suggesting that the data burgeon is growing at 600 to 900 percent per year, as one analyst recently suggested, and that companies must buy more capacity to keep pace (lest a "storage gap" occur) is information that the array maker who sponsored the research can leverage to market gear.

Stilted analyst estimates aside, it is a simple fact that most organizations lack the tools to gauge effectively how fast data is amassing.  Many array manufacturers actually conceal raw capacity measurements from consumers, so determining capacity utilization is a painful undertaking.  Other vendors have taken the path of adding "thin provisioning" to arrays, ostensibly to enable the more efficient use of "reserved but not allocated" capacity, but at the same time obfuscating the administrator's view of how much physical capacity is available at any given time.

An IT Manager or Chief Information Officer (CIO), when asked about his or her rate of data growth, usually responds with a recitation of how much storage capacity he or she added to the technology infrastructure in the company data center.  This is not an answer to the question of data growth rate, but rather how much capacity to store data is being added in a given year.

Still, it is intuitively obvious that the volume of data that is created and stored by organizations is increasing at a substantial rate, requiring more and more storage capacity that delivered over $4 billion in revenues to the top five vendors -- EMC, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems, Dell Computers, and Sun Microsystems -- in the second fiscal quarter of 2006, up 8.5 percent from the same quarter in 2005.  More data translates to more array sales to store it all.

Bottom line:  disk storage technology is quickly becoming the dominant fixture in the corporate data center.  It is also one of the greatest consumers of electrical power, though analysts argue over the relative energy efficiency of storage arrays versus blade servers.  Actual numbers on storage array power consumption are only now being collected by vendors, and are in some cases a closely guarded secret, especially in the wake of negative publicity over a heated argument stirred up by a recent report comparing the energy consumption of a Cisco storage fabric switch with rival Brocade Communication Corporation's switch platform.

Moreover, storage array power consumption does not paint a complete picture of equipment impact on overall data center power requirements.  One must also consider the heat generated by disk arrays and peripheral equipment such as fabric switches, special appliances, and other storage related wares.  Heat must be moved out of data centers, especially disk farms, where it is a leading cause of equipment and especially magnetic media failures.  This is a job for the facility's heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) plant, which is also typically powered by utility electricity.  Adding more disk arrays and other equipment drives up the thermal energy that must be displaced, so more equipment usually necessitates an HVAC capacity upgrade -- and more power.

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