Do you have storage performance issues or low utilization?
Storage performance issues and low utilization are important, especially if the customer's challenge is processing more files. You'll want a system that can do more IOPS per watt, more bandwidth per watt, more files per watt of energy. You're looking for energy efficiency, in other words, being able to do the most amount of work. This is similar to getting the best miles per gallon. For storage systems that aren't active, that's where you would look for a very good capacity per watt, or a low-cost storage. There's a place for energy avoidance, but there's also energy efficiency. That's a reason to ask a customer where their pain points are or what kind of storage performance issues they have, rather than trying to convince that customer to spin their drives down, to turn their storage off, talk to them about solutions that are more energy-efficient.
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| About the author |
| Greg Schulz is founder of the StorageIO Group and author of the books Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures (Elsevier) and The Green and Virtual Data Center: Strategies for enabling environmental and economically friendly Next Generation Data (Auerbach). Learn more at www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com. |
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Return to the green storage FAQ guide and read the rest of Greg's expert responses.
