Solving the Energy Crisis in the Data Center Using COPAN Systems Enhanced MAID Storage Platform

Transcription

1 Solving the Energy Crisis in the Data Center Using COPAN Systems Enhanced MAID Storage Platform "Gartner says the power demands of IT hardware, plus rising fuel prices, make the industry unsustainable and companies must consider green technology. BusinessWeek Aloke Guha COPAN Systems December 1, 2006

2 Abstract Energy consumption for storage in the data center is becoming a paramount concern for everyone in the IT industry from CIOs to technology managers. The increasing volume of spinning disks is creating a large and growing energy crisis. Traditional approaches to reducing energy requirements for data storage, such as replacing lower capacity drives with higher capacity drives, is merely an interim step that only provides incremental, short-term relief. However, these approaches actually do very little to address the overall issue of storage-related power consumption in the data center. To effectively solve this growing problem, COPAN Systems advocates a new approach to the challenge of storing large amounts of fixed, long-term and infrequently accessed persistent data, which now represents over 75% of all data currently under management. COPAN s enhanced MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology is purpose-built for effectively storing persistent data. The platform introduces a dramatically new level of storage system energy efficiency, and coupled with the industry s highest single footprint capacity, delivers a cost savings ranging from 75% to 90% of energy per unit of storage, and a 5x reduction in footprint. The resulting economics are extremely compelling with an estimated four-year power and cooling savings between $9.5 million and $13 million, as compared to data stored on traditional disk array solutions. Given the trends of rising global fuel and energy prices and a high projected rate of data growth, it is not only a matter of addressing the IT budget, there is also the challenge of diminishing availability of energy resources. Simply put, data centers are rapidly running out of power and cooling capacity. It is expected that up to one-third of data centers will exceed their power and cooling capacities by the end of These ominous developments in the cost and availability of basic utilities provide data center managers with no other choice than to move to energy-efficient, persistent data storage systems based on COPAN s enhanced MAID technology. 1 Introduction: Data Center Energy Costs are Increasing The Gartner Group recently predicted 1 that in five years energy costs will consume up to 40% of IT budgets. The growing concerns about data center energy costs are being driven by the increasing density of servers, as well as rising energy consumption. While many studies have been conducted on power and cooling costs per unit of processing, scant attention has been paid to how much it costs to maintain and store data within the data center. It is worthwhile noting the differences between these two components of power consumption. Current trends show that while spending on new servers has not gone up, the cost of power and cooling in the data center has increased exponentially. Much of this increase can be attributed to the higher power density of processing, which has resulted in an eight times (8x) increase in power per rack 2. The balance of the increase in data center power and cooling is due to the exponential growth of disk storage consumption, in terms of total petabytes shipped. 1.1 Disk Storage in the Fortune 1000 Data Center is the Fastest Growing Asset According to a recent survey of data center managers conducted by the The InfoPro, 3 the average installed SAN disk storage capacity in Fortune 1000 (F1000) organizations increased from 138 TB in early 2004, to over 680 TB in October In fact, the installed storage capacity for the average Fortune 1000 customer has doubled every 10 months since At this growth rate, the total disk capacity in a F1000 data center can be expected to grow from 680 terabytes to over 8 petabytes in four years. (Even at a much more modest growth rate, say 50% increase per year, the capacity in the fourth year would still be 2.3 petabytes). 1 Andy McCue interview with Gartner Group, Energy Could Eat Up to 40% of IT Budgets, November 7, Humphreys and Scaramella, The Impact of Power and Cooling on Data Center Infrastructure, IDC, May Robert Stevenson, Storage Wave 8 - Networking Press Release TheInfoPro, October 17, 2006

3 Figure 1. Growth in SAN disk storage in the average Fortune 1000 data center. (Source: The InfoPro) A major impact of this exponential growth of data is that storage is significantly increasing its share of energy demands in the data center. Many estimates predict that 20% to 30% of the energy spent in a data center can be attributed to storage. Kevin Kettler, CTO at Dell, has stated that in Dell s data center, storage energy consumption is almost at parity with that of servers 4. This approximates 37% for storage and 40% for servers, with the remainder attributed to telecom and networking. 1.2 Data Keeps Accumulating in the Data Center The key contributing factor to this explosive data growth in the data center is that most of the existing data is not being deleted. By many estimates, 75% or more of the data in a data center is being retained for long periods of time. This is being driven by corporate and legal compliance requirements for data retention and the need for data accessibility for future re-use. These retention requirements affect nearly every industry and business segment including manufacturing, retail and service, financial, healthcare, and government. As a result, most of the usable data remains - and is expected to remain - on disk. Regardless of the class of data center, tier of storage used, or the current energy expenditure, the increasing amount of data that needs to be kept accessible on disk means storage-related power consumption will continue to increase over time. It is not surprising that with the combination of data (storage) and computing (server) requirements, power for data centers has become a serious concern. Liebert, a power supply vendor, found in its data center user group survey that 33% of respondents expect to be out of power and cooling capacity by the end of 2007, and 96% stated they would be out of capacity by /5 Drew Robb, Storage Turns Power Hungry, Enterprise Storage Forum, October 20,

4 2 Solving the Data Center Energy Crisis: Recognize Persistent Data There is no magic bullet to reduce power requirements in the design of magnetic disks. Spinning spindles draw power, and the more data that needs to be accessible means more spindles, and more spinning spindles means more power! Some storage vendors have decided to address this problem with a short-term approach of replacing existing lower capacity Fibre Channel drives with higher capacity Fibre Channel drives. While this may equate to incremental power and cooling savings, it does very little to solve the inherent issue. These disks, although higher capacity, are still powered on 100% of the time, which does very little to stem the tide of explosive persistent data growth, and the increasing energy needs in the face of finite data center power and cooling capacity. In addition, replacing lower capacity drives with higher capacity drives introduces performance degradation. These storage vendors tell customers that this lower performance is acceptable because the data is probably in a persistent state, and does not require the sophistication or the expense of transactional storage. So, why not move this data to a storage system that is purpose-built for persistent data? Smarter ways of reducing energy in storage can be drawn analogously to how we reduce residential energy costs. Using higher capacity drives to reduce energy efficiency is analogous to replacing 60-watt incandescent bulbs with 25-watt fluorescent bulbs in a building. However, if the building is empty, why keep the lights on in the first place? We believe this analogy leads to a fundamental system-level approach to solving the data storage energy problem. Data center managers are recognizing that 70% to 90% of the data in their data centers is not transactional in nature, but rather, persistent data that is rarely changed, and infrequently accessed. The quality of service (QoS) requirements for persistent data are less demanding in terms of system performance (I/Os per second), access time latency, and levels of concurrent data access. Combine the lower QoS levels required for persistent data with the other storage system characteristics which are optimal for persistent data, including dependable long-term data retention, higher reliability, higher data integrity, low power and cooling, and small footprint, and you have the value proposition of COPAN Systems enhanced MAID platform. In Persistent Data Storage Architecture (PDSA) The New Emerging Data Ecosystem, a white paper recently written by COPAN Systems, it is explained that because persistent data has unique attributes, the requirements of the storage system must also be modified. A storage system purpose-built for persistent data is tuned more for reliability, integrity, longevity, low energy and data center floor space needs, and has much lower acquisition costs and lower total cost of ownership. 3 Persistent Data Storage and MAID Because persistent data is becoming the dominant type of data that is stored today, the key to managing persistent data in the data center is to deploy storage systems that are tuned specifically to its needs. One solution that is ideally suited for persistent data is MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage 6/7. Smaller footprint MAID-based systems reduce disk power usage by powering up disks only as needed, and limiting the maximum number of disks that are in use at any one time. Because unneeded disks are idle or powered off, MAID technology consumes much less energy - not only to run disks, but also to cool them. Limiting power consumption not only reduces data center energy costs, but also increases the effective life of the disks themselves, hence increasing overall disk reliability and enhancing data protection. All of these attributes are a perfect match with persistent data accessibility requirements. COPAN Systems enhanced MAID platform is a storage system architecture that is built to meet the overall needs of persistent data in terms of scale and density of storage, reliability and integrity, performance, as well as power and cooling costs. I think 85+% of the data sitting on a production array is non-transactional, or post-transactional. Even worse, at least half the data is a replicate of non-transactional data. Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group 6 Dennis Colarelli and Dirk Grunwald, Massive Arrays of Idle Disks for Storage Archives, 2002 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, November 2002, Baltimore, Maryland. 7 The Dictionary of Storage Networking Technology, Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), 2005/2006, pp

5 The power consumption advantage of enhanced MAID systems is in its power density and can be measured in terms of capacity per unit of power, or TB/KW. The greater the power density, the less power required by the system. COPAN System s enhanced MAID products maintain extremely low power requirements combined with massive density, which brings COPAN s power density to over 90 TB/KW 8. Compare that to the average Fibre Channel disk products power density which is approximately 4 TB/KW, or the average SATA disk products power density of approximately 17 TB/KW, and the conclusion is obvious. Figure 2 was constructed from published data on power consumption ratings from several leading storage vendors. This data shows how COPAN Systems enhanced MAID storage system, the Revolution 200 series of products, compares to traditional Tier 1 (Fibre Channel) and Tier 2 (typically SATA) storage products. As shown in Figure 2, the COPAN enhanced MAID platform is 4x to 30x better in power density, and 4x to 20x better in storage density than traditional Fibre Channel and SATA storage systems. Figure 2. Comparison of environmental factors showing the advantages of greater power density and smaller footprint obtained by using COPAN s enhanced MAID storage for persistent data. 8 *Power Density is the total capacity (TB) divided by the system power consumption (Kilowatts). The greater the power density, the less power required by the system. **Storage Density is the total capacity (TB) divided by the data center square footage (Sq. Ft.) required by the system. 4

6 4 Energy Benefits of Enhanced MAID The immediate benefits in reduced energy consumption are obvious when one compares a MAID storage system with traditional storage arrays. In terms of the total power consumption of a storage system, for both disk and non-disk components, COPAN Systems enhanced MAID storage requires 11 watts per 1,000 GB of capacity, as compared to 51 watts per 1,000 GB for standard all-spinning SATA arrays, assuming both are using 500 GB drives. Enterprise class, high performance Fibre Channel storage with 73 GB drives can draw as much as 728 watts per 1,000 GB! In addition, for every watt of power consumed, an equivalent amount of energy for cooling is required as well. To examine the aggregate impact of these power consumption differences, consider that a typical Fortune 1000 data center has over 680 TB of usable disk storage, with a storage system infrastructure comprised of 60% Fibre Channel disk, and 40% SATA disk 9. However, as with Fibre Channel storage, traditional SATA arrays are transactional-based storage systems. Therefore, the conversion of most of the transactional storage to MAID-based storage presents a large opportunity to reduce energy costs in the data center. Because 75% or more of the data in the data center can be classified as persistent and not transactional, IT manager can move most of the data off both Fibre Channel and SATA transactional disk storage to MAIDbased persistent storage. The following scenarios assume that 50% to 75% of all data currently residing on Fibre Channel and SATA storage can be migrated to enhanced MAID. Scenario 1: Migrating 50% of data to enhanced MAID If only 50% of the data were migrated to MAID, the energy savings realized by the data center would be approximately $470,000 in the first year, almost $5,700,000 in the fourth year. Scenario 2a: Migrating 75% of data to enhanced MAID If as much as 75% of the data were migrated to MAID, which is the most likely scenario, the energy savings realized by the data center would be approximately $640,000 in the first year and almost $7,800,000 in the fourth year. Scenario 2b: Migrating 75% of data to enhanced MAID (from higher capacity Fibre Channel and SATA) Even if the data center were currently using denser 146 GB Fibre Channel drives, the economics would still be compelling; the first year s energy savings would be over $400,000 and would total more than $5,000,000 in the fourth year. Assumptions These calculations assume an average cost of $0.11 per KW-hour, 500 GB drives in the SATA and MAID storage, and a Fortune 1000 industry standard growth rate of 230% as cited on page 2. The power estimates are based on the actual power and cooling requirements of today s Fibre Channel and SATA arrays, and COPAN s enhanced MAID storage systems. This example assumes that 500 GB disk drives are the highest capacity drives available. While we recognize that higher capacity drives will likely be introduced over the next 3 to 4 years, the power and cooling specifications for these future higher capacity drives are not yet available for the purposes of this analysis. 9 Robert Stevenson, Storage Wave 8 - Networking Press Release" TheInfoPro, October 17,

7 Savings ($) Annual Savings with Migration to Enhanced MAID Migration From 73 GB Fibre Channel and SATA Disk Figure 3a. Total energy savings for a typical Fortune 1000 data center when aged transactional data is migrated to persistent data storage on MAID. Assumes 60% of data was stored on 73 GB Fibre Channel drives, and 40% of data was stored on SATA drives. Year Savings ($) Annual Savings with Migration to Enhanced MAID Migration From 146 GB Fibre Channel and SATA Disk Figure 3b. Total energy savings for a typical Fortune 1000 data center when aged transactional data is migrated to persistent data storage on MAID. Assumes 60% of data was stored on 146 GB Fibre Channel drives, and 40% of data was stored on SATA drives. Year 5 The Data Center Energy Imperative: Call To Action Saving millions of dollars or even tens of millions of dollars over the next few years is a great incentive for any data center manager to move their persistent data to enhanced MAID storage. However, perhaps even more compelling than the economics, is that data centers may not even have the power available to do business as usual when it comes to storing and managing their data. Where power and cooling considerations were once restricted to sizing a UPS, it is now a fundamental limitation in how a data center can grow to meet future business demands. When planning for storage growth, data center managers must now consider the environmental impact of any equipment to be installed. The message is clear: traditional storage technologies do not address this problem. The call to action is obvious. To avert an energy crisis in your data center: identify your growing persistent data and move it to energy-efficient storage systems based on COPAN s enhanced MAID! 6

8 6 References 1 Andy McCue, Energy Could Eat Up to 40% of IT Budgets, November 7, chan=tc&campaign_id=rss_tech 2 Drew Robb, Storage Turns Power Hungry, Enterprise Storage Forum, October 20, Robert Stevenson, Storage Wave 8 - Networking Press Release The InfoPro, October 17, J. Humphreys and J. Scaramella, The Impact of Power and Cooling on Data Center Infrastructure, IDC, May IDC Insight, Storage Power Management Is Heating Up: Challenges and Solutions, July Gartner Research, Data Center Facilities Cost Survey: 2006 Update, June 2, The Dictionary of Storage Networking Technology, Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), 2005/2006, pp Dennis Colarelli and Dirk Grunwald, Massive Arrays of Idle Disks for Storage Archives, 2002 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, November 2002, Baltimore, Maryland. 9 Storage Challenges Abound amongst Fortune 1000, Says The InfoPro Persistent Data Storage Architecture (PDSA) The New Emerging Data Ecosystem, COPAN Systems White Paper, September 19, For More Information To learn more about MAID or COPAN Systems please contact: 1900 Pike Road Longmont, CO Phone: COPAN Systems, Longmont, CO. Patented POWER MANAGED RAID software and DISK AEROBICS software are the property of COPAN Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Other company names and product names mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of other vendors/manufacturers.