A greener backup solution

Lim Cheng Chaun Australia manager for Tandbery exclusively speaks to CRN.

The budget/resource dilemma

Budgets across small and medium-sized businesses are under increased scrutiny and restraint.

Overall, operational expenses, total cost of ownership and return on investment drive budget planning and spending. Nowhere has this become more acute than in IT departments.

According to IDC, for every dollar spent on computer hardware an additional 50 cents is spent on energy. Within the next four years that number will rise by 54 percent.

Analyst firm Gartner predicts energy costs will soon consume up to one-third of IT budgets. German newspaper  Die Zeit reports that a single Google search request consumes as much energy per hour  as an energy-saving lamp.

What's more, according to Simon Mingay of Gartner, IT equipment worldwide is responsible for 2 percent of CO² emissions, which corresponds to the amounts of CO² emitted by aircraft.

Data and energy

Companies battling rising energy costs face a growing torrent of data.

The more digital content, the more storage capacity they need. Likewise the physical size of the data centre. 

As well, companies need 24/7 access to large amounts of data, as compliance regulations extend the retention periods for documents and information that must be retained. 

And, there is a growing awareness of backup needs as part of an overall business continuity or disaster recovery plan.

Attention to data storage accumulates costs, as companies consume more power.

Data centres are filled with active servers with spinning disk drives which consume energy and generate heat which then must be cooled.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, energy consumption by corporate data centres doubled between 2000 and 2006. In 2006, data centres accounted for 1.5 percent of electricity use in the US and that number may double within three years.

The EPA also forecasts that power failures and brownouts will affect more than 90 percent of US data centres, while half of all larger data centres will lack the power and cooling capabilities to run high-density equipment.

The EPA predicts half of the world's data centres will become obsolete because of power and space restrictions.

Efficient data centres will reduce operating costs from power utilisation and capital expenditure by slowing or even eliminating data centre equipment purchases.

According to IDC, for every server removed from the data centre, approximately 11.4 tons of CO² emissions are eliminated. 

By adopting existing energy-saving techniques, the EPA estimates data centres could cut energy use nearly in half, potentially saving US$14 billion by 2011.