Power and storage: the hidden cost of ownership.

Fred Moore, renowned storage engineer and author in the storage and high-tech industry, stated that the availability of electricity will become increasingly critical ("10 Challenges for the Storage Industry: How many do you think will be met in 2003?" Computer Technology News, January 2003). Moore also predicts that by 2010, over 50% of power consumed in the United States will be by computer technology. He is probably right. Already, today's data centers require well over 100 watts per square foot, or more than 10 times that of the average household.

Not only is electrical power generation being out-paced by demand, utility costs are one of the hidden cost burdens to any company. The power factor is rarely incorporated when equating the TCO (total cost of ownership) of storage. One of the biggest consumers of power within the computer technology industry is storage, and the little magnetic disk drive is one of the worst power hogs in the business. The magnetic disk drive is very similar to a honeybee. One is no problem. You can even have dozens, but when you reach hundreds or thousands then you have a swarm.

Thousands of spindles turning disc platters at 5400, 7200, 10000 and even 15000 RPM. All these hard drives living off electricity and, to make matters worse, they're generating heat.

The Cost of Electricity

Whether you live in Manhattan, Chicago, Atlanta or San Francisco, one thing is for sure: electricity is expensive! According to the latest Department of Energy study (2002), the average cost-per kilowatt-hour (KWh) in the U.S. was 6.93 cents. You're lucky if your data center is in Kentucky (4.1 cent/KWh), but no so lucky if your center is in Hawaii (13.9 cents). California and New York averaged 10 and 11 cents respectively. 1000 watts of power for mere pennies per hour may sound so miniscule, that you might consider it not worth factoring into the TCO equation; but as you will see, this miniscule amount grows painfully large.

For the sake of discussion, let's look at the fictitious company of Extensive Data Corporation (EDC) in the fictional city of Storageville, CA. According to the California Public Utilities Commission, the utility rates for Storageville could be anywhere from 6.5 cents to 18 cents per KWh. At first glance, EDC might consider the cost of powering their data storage solution to be relatively minor, and might even resolve fallaciously that they can afford a virtual farm of data storage solutions. However, one glance at how much power a large storage system would likely consume and how much that power would cost, may change management's decision.

Calculating the cost of energy usage using the published energy requirements of one of the industry's top selling enterprise storage solutions, a 100-terabyte (TB) configuration requires 40KWh. Using a median California rate of 10 cents per kilowatt, the formula is simple:

#KWh x Cost per Kilowatt = Power Cost/Hr Or 40KWh x .10 = $4.00 or $96.00 per day Or $35,040 per year

If the utility charges stay constant (and you know it will go higher) calculated over 5 years, the base electrical costs for this 100TB of disk storage would be $175,200.00. If you have applied business continuance disk mirrors, then double the amount to $350,400.

We're not done with the calculators just yet. There is one other factor that we failed to take into consideration; all electrical products produce heat. Heat is called BTUs (British Thermal Units) and for every watt of power consumed, 3.41 BTUs are created. As a result, the 100TBs of RAID noted above generate approximately 136,400 BTUs per hour. The more power used, the more heat is produced, which must be compensated with cooling to prevent the products from overheating. Air conditioning systems installed on top of buildings are used to introduce cool air into the computer room to keep the temperature constant. Unfortunately, air conditioning systems use power, too, and the age and efficiency of the air conditioning system will determine how much electricity and cost necessary to keep the above storage system cool. The efficiency of an air conditioner is based on the K-Factor. High efficiency units may consume as little as .33 BTU to cool 1 BTU of Heat. Older units may have a 1:1 power to cooling ratio. Therefore the next calculation looks like this:

#BTU/3.4/1000 x .33 x .10 = Cost Or 136400/3.4/1000 x .33 x .125 = $1.32 Or 31.68 per day Or $ 11,563 per year

Prorate this again over five years and your cooling costs grow to $57,815 (again, double this amount if running a mirror). Adding the cost of running the storage unit to the electrical cost of cooling the storage unit, the total cost of power usage over five years is $233,015 or $466,030 mirrored.

Remember the statewide power crisis in California of 2000-2001? Its genesis can be traced to four major events:

* An energy deregulation bill signed in 1996 by then California Governor Pete Wilson, opening California's electricity market to competition.

* Although the state's population increased by an average of 600,000 people per year, during the 12 years preceding the Davis Administration, no new major power plants were built in California.

* Drought conditions in the Pacific Northwest in 2000 and 2001 significantly reduced the volume of water available for generating hydroelectric power.

* In recent years, less emphasis was placed on energy conservation and efficiency programs.

Why is this a national concern? As many as 25 other states are presently considering energy deregulation and are looking at California's approach as a model.

Obviously, the concern over energy goes far beyond California, or even the United States, as evidenced by the international headlines (See Box). However, we can all learn from California's recovery. Focusing efforts to reduce peak electricity demand, the Davis Administration promoted incentive programs encouraging voluntary load reduction by customers, the reduction of energy demands by new technologies, the development of energy efficient construction techniques, and the installation of energy efficient equipment. Before the close of 2001, the impact of all these conservation and efficiency efforts was already more than 6,000 Mega Watts (MW) of savings!

Storage Zen

Still, the amount of data is growing at an astounding rote as the deluge of information keeps organizations scrambling for additional storage resources to store it. Consequently, the cost of storing and maintaining this data is growing exponentially. TCO, relative to data storage, is not limited to mere hardware and software. It was only a decade ago when Gigabytes was the buzzword, now terabytes, petabytes, and even exabytes are topics of discussion. The challenge is balancing the fight mix of technologies to provide efficient delivery of the content to the user.

Even as proclaimed masters of storage, IT managers do not have an easy job achieving balance in the environment. On one side, they have users who want "more capacity, more capacity, more capacity"; and on the other side they have management asking, "how much? how much? how much?" Striking a nirvana between capacity and cost is a full-time job, in part, because of the challenges revolved in getting multiple systems to work seamlessly and, in part, because "how much?" demands much more than just acquisition costs.

Out With the Old In With the ... What?

Taking a look at the classic HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) migration of files from online space to tertiary space, it could be claimed that the data storage solution was being managed as efficiently as possible. However, this is no longer the case when considering the overwhelming amount of online storage acquired by institutions today. Depending on which research group you believe, online storage requirements are growing between 100-200% annually. This increase doesn't even take into account growing tertiary storage requirements. The sheer volume of data being collected by companies and the size of individual data sets are forcing these institutions to install storage at record rates.

To highlight these trends (and further complicate storage matters), in 2002 several of the top supercomputer sites, including many commercial corporations, have rendered classic HSM applications obsolete due to their inefficiency in backup and restoration of data in a fast and timely fashion. Living in a microwave society and a world of instant gratification, many consider the wait for a file to be restored from tape to take "an eternity" and to be a complete waste of valuable man-hours.

The latest trend is to splice additional online disks between the existing enterprise online RAID and the tape library to drastically shrink backup and archive windows then trickle data to tape behind the scenes. These latest trends go by the acronym of D2D (disk to disk) or D2D2T (disk to disk to tape). So what has this achieved? This solution keeps users happy by retrieving data in a fast and efficient manner and MIS is happy because backup and archive windows are now measurably smaller. The one thing that this solution does not resolve is POWER. In fact, this solution only compounds the problem. The next logical storage trend must address not only the issues of tremendous file capacity and time efficient data backup and restoration, but the vital issue of power consumption as well.

Saved by a ... FireFly

To address all three key storage issues faced by today's data intensive environments; ASACA has introduced the FireFly DM Series of digital virtual storage libraries. This next-generation nearline solution encompasses all the necessary technologies to address all the challenges facing Information System Professionals, at a cost-per-gigabyte that won't alienate the chief financial officer.

The world's first non-robotic, fully electronic digital library, FireFly is designed to address even the most storage-intensive environments with the extreme level of performance, scalability and flexibility required for High Data Broadcast, Medical and Financial institutions, Oil and Gas Industries, and Fortune 500 companies.

ASACA's FireFly delivers as many as 48 concurrent strings of data per library, at an unprecedented 400MB/s, but with an energy requirement equal to about eight 120W light bulbs. As a result, FireFly is the industry's most uniquely qualified solution for providing the compulsory level of performance, reliability, scalability, economy--and last but not least power efficiency required today.

Making Headlines

The cost of energy isn't the only issue at hand. Power shortages and drastically reduced energy availability has become a global concern as evident in current headlines from around the world.

"US Power Sector Faces Huge Debt In 2003: Energy Companies Borrow About $500 Billion"

"Tokyo May Face Power Shortages by End of June"

"China Faces Power Shortage: Demand Jumps Between 9 and 10% This Year With Shortages Emerging in Many Provinces"

"New Zealand's Electricity Savings Well Short of Target"

"Nationwide Electric Power Cuts Loom"

"Massachusetts Electric Seeks Hike in Rates"

"Zim (South Africa) Seeks $75m for Fuel"

www.asaca.com

Chuck Larabie is vice president of sales and marketing at ASACA (Golden, CO)