More Than 80% Energy Savings from Tiered Disk Storage Strategy: Planet Filestore: Final Report

JISC has released Planet Filestore:Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

Findings

  • By holding the majority of user files on storage which consumes lower amounts of energy, and which is accessed and backed-up less frequently, there were significant percentage energy (and financial) savings. Modelling indicates that moving 80% of files from RAID10 tier 1 storage to nonmirrored RAID5 tier 2 storage results in a 72% energy saving.
  • Cardiff University’s environment, 93% of files were not modified more than 60 days after they were first created. This means that tiered storage would benefit our environment significantly, with an 82% energy saving.
  • Hardware manufacturers' energy consumption statements were experimentally found to be a reasonable guide to maximum power consumption. This is useful to know when using modelling tools.
  • Idle disks may consume almost as much (approximately 90%) energy as busy disks. This means that unless a storage array has "spin-down" features, it is best to add disk capacity only as and when needed.

Read more about it at "Moving Files, Saving Energy."

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