Four ways to make IT more energy efficient

21 March 2013 | Categories: Data Technology
Tags: drives, IBM, IT, MAID, seagate, syncexp

seagate Four ways to make IT more energy efficient Energy efficiency is goodness, never more than this year. That’s reflected in the IT industry with a never-more-than-now focus on reducing power consumption. But some of the most valuable efficiency improvements are the ones that go beyond the obvious.

1. Do less. This is the obvious one. In storage, slower disk drives can be used that use less power. But much like scrapping your car for a bike, it works for only some situations and can reduce effectiveness productivity.

2. Do things more efficiently. For storage, this is the best bang for your buck. At the drive level it means more efficient mechanisms and power management techniques that reduce overall Watts/GB. For systems, it’s designing smart, turning of sectors and components when not in use, MAID, etc. These investments pay off every minute of every day, year after year.

3. Reuse power. Largely untapped in IT is the concept of reuse. IBM is innovating here by using supercomputer heat to heat the data center.

4. Reuse disk drives. Seagate is making data center disk drives re-usable with encrypted erase, which instantly wipes drives totally clean of their old data. Ten percent of enterprise disk drives reused would save close to a million drives from the scrap heap.

What’s number 5?