According to experts, data centers may run out of power in the next two years. The prediction may cause execs to reconsider how they are investing in and managing their digital infrastructure. This BlogBytes article will examine the ‘power’ concern and give some insight on how to protect your data assets with help from LTO technology.
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Efficiently protect tons of data on tape: The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has stored an Exabyte of data on tape. How big is an Exabyte and how did they do it? Hear their story in this short podcast here.
NO MORE POWER!
Marc Ganzi, CEO of DigitalBridge, warned in a recent datacenterdynamics.com article that data centers could run out of power in the next two years. Ganzi stated If you think about how much power remains on the US grid, we’re down to less than 7GW … we’re probably down to less than 2.8 to 3GW in Europe. It’s power transmission and distribution that are constrained. Transmission grids are capacity challenged.” Ganzi added that “AI is actually part of the solution and will be deployed to see how DigitalBridge data centers can operate more efficiently.”
MORE EFFICIENCY
Running more efficiently is an objective that many organizations strive for. This is typically viewed from a financial standpoint, which is paramount, but also is considered from a resource utilization perspective especially in the data center when it comes to sustainable data storage.
Data is being retained for longer periods than ever before. In fact, many firms are now storing most data forever since it may be needed to meet future customer, marketing analysis demands, and other AI workloads. The motto is ‘don’t delete anything!’ Therefore, storage managers strive to reduce power consumption, utilize floor space more effectively, and reduce long term data storage costs. Some big tech firms are considering the nuclear power option to address the demand for AI as explained in a recent article.
WHAT’S LIT UP
Storage managers are scrutinizing every aspect of their data centers to discover what’s lit up and what’s not, so that costs can be reduced related to acquisition, power, cooling and space consumption. A recent study by Solutions North Consulting examined data storage economics by comparing the long term total cost of ownership of storing one petabyte of data for 10 years with tape, disk and cloud.
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The analysis showed in the chart above that “LTO-9 tape has a measurable Return on Investment of up to 1856% when compared to cloud storage, and 501% compared to HDD.”1 In addition, when considering power consumption, the study revealed “reducing the energy consumed by stored data through the use of LTO-9 tape technology offers larger data centers even greater measurable benefits.”
The LTO TCO AND SUSTAINABILITY CALCULATOR TOOL provides a clear view on how tape technology can help achieve sustainability goals in data centers. Try the TCO Tool here.
IT’S HOT OR IT’S COLD!
It is predicted that in the coming years, data will be either ‘hot’ or ‘cold.’ In the paper ‘Storage Management in an Age of Minimal Data Deletion’ by Further Market Research, it is projected that, “in most data centers, ~30% of the data will be classified as hot in 2030, while the warm and cool and cold data layers diminish to insignificance, and the frozen data layer grows to ~70% of the total—there will be no fine distinctions, either the data is hot, or it’s not.” Offline tape storage will be the key repository for the majority of data. Further Market Research explains that “Tape offers ‘offline air-gap’ data security as well as guaranteed Write Once Read Many (WORM) immutability and a specified 50-year shelf life, with much lower initial acquisition costs/GB than SSDs or HDDs.”
The warning of data center power challenges is important to heed which makes controlling storage costs while securing data long term essential. See more on protecting data from cyber-crime in a short video called “Tape’s Compelling Benefits for Safeguarding Against Ransomware.”
1 TCO study costs included hardware, maintenance, floor space, media, energy, data retrieval charges, operations and more.
