Green Data Storage

The increas­ing demands on infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy for more stor­age capac­ity cre­ate impacts that are espe­cially felt in the areas of power, cool­ing, and space require­ments. Addi­tion­ally, infra­struc­ture changes may be required which can be very costly or imprac­ti­cal to accom­plish in a rea­son­able amount of time.

 IT pro­fes­sion­als are look­ing for alter­na­tives to alle­vi­ate or mit­i­gate some of the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with the impacts of increas­ing stor­age capac­ity. With so much pub­lic­ity around power con­sump­tion and car­bon foot­print, “green” solu­tions are highly sought after. There are dif­fer­ent approaches to improve the sit­u­a­tion, each of which has a much dif­fer­ent result.

His­tor­i­cally, read­ily acces­si­ble data resides on spin­ning disks, while data that is not needed imme­di­ately is stored on remov­able media. Spin­ning disks have the great­est neg­a­tive impact on power and cool­ing, while remov­able media has the most pos­i­tive impact. One of the advances made recently was to power down ranks of disk dri­ves in disk arrays after they had been inac­tive for some pre­de­ter­mined amount of time. Powering-down disk sys­tems is not a nor­mal usage case and requires the disks to be spun-up peri­od­i­cally to be tested and cycled again.

The great­est advance­ment in address­ing power and cool­ing require­ments has come with the ProS­tor Infini­Vault® and its use of RDX® remov­able disk tech­nol­ogy for long-term data reten­tion. With the use of RDX tech­nol­ogy, the ProS­tor Infini­Vault can have over 50TB of online capac­ity behind 2TB of online disk.

The ProS­tor Infini­Vault online capac­ity is inher­ently a green solution:

• Up to 100 RDX remov­able disks can be avail­able online and are spun-down when not trans­fer­ring data
• The RDX remov­able disks do not need to be powered-up and tested peri­od­i­cally because they use mobile hard dri­ves with ramp-loaded heads. The disk dri­ves are made to be powered-down fre­quently and the heads do not come into con­tact with the media and do not land in the sur­face lubri­cant. The heads retract onto the ramp when no longer trans­fer­ring data.
• The ProS­tor Infini­Vault is the most green of all long-term stor­age imple­men­ta­tions with RDX remov­able disk. When the RDX car­tridges are removed and archived to a shelf or in a vault, they are not con­sum­ing resources, except the small amount of phys­i­cal space where the disk car­tridges are stacked.