Consider a data-intensive sector like telecom that is booming with the entry of new players, and, in the mirror image, consider the burgeoning customer information that these players deal with on a regular basis. With fierce competition and the need to increase their subscriber base while sustaining their market share, these telecom companies are investing heavily in IT infrastructure. Telecom companies are in fact one of the largest investors in technology and consequently are the biggest markets for storage, where the maximum potential exists.

This sudden metamorphosis in the telecom industry has been brought about by the advent of wireless technology, the Internet, convergence of data, voice and media, and industry consolidations driven by mergers and acquisitions. As a result, the industry has had to face a number of challenges, including growth in regulatory requirements.

With data explosion and increasing storage requirements by the telecom industry, data centers are the worst hit as they are most affected in terms of greater loads. Data centers continue to require additional hardware to meet their business needs that in turn increases power consumption and cooling requirements.

But here the mirror image differs a bit, since data centers are running out of power as governmental and environmental regulations are increasing alongside an increasing cost-per-watt, making power even more expensive. This is a cause for concern for telecom operators that plan to reduce their energy use and carbon footprints and position themselves as a 'green' company.

Consequently, a growing number of these telecom companies have found the use of software as a solution. By way of switching to software to manage data storage and growth they reduce their hardware power consumption and cooling needs.

Some areas where telecom players can reduce their energy consumption and bring in greening include:

Requirements of Power
In a November 2006 Gartner study, 50% of data centers reported that they could foresee insufficient power and cooling capacity by 2008.

Worse, power is not cheap nor is it getting any cheaper. Large organizations spend between 4-8%, and sometimes as much as 10% of their IT budgets on energy. Gartner has also predicted that this expenditure will rise by up to four times within the next five years.

To address these issues, companies are utilizing low power servers and standby power management software and are improving power supply efficiency. Many are also leveraging virtualization to address a small portion of the problem. Indeed, using more energy-efficient servers is an effective approach to energy conservation. Yet, as enterprises buy these servers, they are faced with another challenge: migrating enterprise data agilely to newer devices and subsystems while maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

And this is where the good news begins. By using software that enables organizations to improve storage utilization, deploy storage tiering, and use hardware more efficiently; telecom companies can create energy efficiencies in the data center and meet established response time levels.

Provisioning Storage
Telecom players operate according to predetermined service level agreements (SLAs). These SLAs may specify how accessible specific data should be, the duration it should be retained for and how quickly it must be made available during peak periods. Data that experiences high read, write, and update activity, sometimes referred to as transaction data, often requires high performance storage. Data that does not experience high activity, sometimes referred to as non-transaction data; typically can reside on lower performance and more power efficient storage.

Yet, in practice, the majority of data is non-transaction data stored on expensive, high-performance, and power-consuming disks that have relatively modest capacities. By identifying and then migrating non-transaction data to the appropriate lower performance disks, organizations can save power and energy. The lower consumed watts per gigabyte ratio of these high capacity, lower performance disks and disk systems can save substantial energy use.

Today's dynamic storage tiering solutions provide continuous migration support for file system data, using automated methods that respond to changing conditions. Using such a solution in combination with a scheduled data migration service for both file system data and data contained within database structures gives organizations effective enterprise data migration capabilities between tiers. Better yet, analysis tools can monitor file system activity and distinguish files that are active from files that are inactive and, therefore, are eligible for archiving or migration to more energy efficient storage devices.

Telecom players can also reduce power consumption by identifying duplicate data; these companies often retain too many data copies. In fact, a typical organization may have between 10 and 30 copies of each production data byte. Needless to say, many of these copies are no longer needed, are misplaced or even worse, the enterprise doesn't even know they still exist. Clearly, reducing the number of data copies reduces storage capacity requirements and storage power consumption. Once reduced, snapshots and other copies from high performance disks can be moved to lower performance disks.

Admittedly, because of continuing data growth, any existing data storage subsystem will eventually exceed available capacity unless more capacity is made available, and the data center may not have enough space or electric power to support expanded storage capacity. At this point, many enterprises begin to consider building a new data center that can easily cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over time.

But a more economical solution could be to leverage MAID (massive array of inactive disks) technology, which consumes a small fraction of the electric power used by lower performance storage systems that house non-transactional data. MAID storage subsystems power-off idle disks and power them back on when an application needs access to dormant data. This gives enterprises a third energy-efficient data storage tier for migrating data.

While hardware power and cooling requirements are the source of many data center energy problems, software can help remediate them. In fact, some vendors contend that their software can help customers reduce data storage energy consumption by as much as 50% and total data center energy consumption by as much as 25%.

Reducing electrical power consumption will likely remain an enterprise imperative. By improving storage utilization, deploying storage tiering, and using hardware more efficiently, organizations can significantly reduce their data center power consumption and cooling requirements.

Vishal Dhupar
The author is MD, Symantec India
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in