Green Data Project Says Data Management Key To Energy Efficiency

October 3, 2007

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The Green Data Project has launched with a goal of making data itself, not just hardware, energy efficient, PC Magazine reports. The project is a collaboration between Data Management Institute and Archive Management.org and wants to help companies re-file seldom-used data to low-energy, archival hardware. According to PC Magazine, corporate servers are about 40 percent full of” stuff no one ever looks at.”

”There are many green initiatives within the industry today, but almost all of them are advancing tactical measures involving hardware technologies rather than strategic approaches focused on archive and data management,” said Jon William Toigo, Founder of both Data Management Institute and AMO. “Green IT must begin with green data. Otherwise a company’s data center greening initiative amounts to little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

The Green Data Project argues that throwing more disk arrays to achieve data center power efficiency, or adding the complexities of thin provisioning software, de-duplication software, or compression software, does not constitute a strategic or permanent solution to the twin problems of storage growth and burgeoning power demands.

Toigo contends that servers will shortly be overtaken by storage arrays as the biggest power hogs in the corporate data center. Driving the acquisition of storage capacity, he says, is a general failure of companies to manage their data, which is stored on expansive storage infrastructure.

”The hardware vendors are reacting in a predictable way to capitalize on a popular trend: Green IT,” Toigo added. “They are leveraging concerns about power availability and cost, and the growing eco-consciousness of many firms, to sell more gear. They are joined by many software providers who want to wrap their wares in the green flag when, in fact, they contribute little more than a tactical and short-lived delay in 300 percent growth in disk storage analysts are expecting over the next three years.”

The value of technologies like data compression and de-duplication is limited and tactical, according to Toigo. They can buy time that companies can put to good use sorting out their storage junk drawers and putting archiving programs in place.

Early sponsors of the Green Data Project include FileTek, Clearview Software, QStar Technologies, KOM Networks, Plasmon, Caringo, C2C Systems, CA, Data Islandia, and Zerowait.

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