Investor's Business Daily, July 31st, 2007
"Green storage" might sound like a label for a refrigerator drawer, but in the data storage business it's a new way to describe products aimed at energy efficiency and cost savings.
There's a lot of marketing in the term, analysts say. Some wares billed as "green" weren't created with the goal of being green. But the products do aim to help customers cut the amount of power used by their corporate data centers, and by that definition are green.
"I do think (the green push) is real," said Brad Nisbet, an analyst with research firm IDC. "We're definitely seeing a lot of activity today with respect to storage solutions that are green."
Market Moves
The latest green storage announcement came in June, when Hewlett-Packard HPQ unveiled a lineup of storage products.
HP said the products could cut power usage, mostly cooling costs, by 50% at data centers, the facilities where businesses keep their network servers, storage devices and other computer products.
HP executives hope the new products will help them better compete against the likes of IBM IBM, EMC EMC and Network Appliance NTAP. All those companies have made energy efficiency a priority. Last month, EMC announced updates to storage products that include green features such as more energy-efficient disk drives and chips.
With so much data now stored on so many networks, revenue from disk-based storage products is expected to rise to $31 billion in 2012 from $24 billion last year, IDC says. HP leads the disk storage market, followed by IBM and EMC. Tape is the other main type of storage media.
Just how much being "green" could help storage vendors boost sales is a much-debated question.
A company that proves it's more green than the others could gain a couple percentage points of market share, Nisbet says, but not much more.
And it's a gray area, analysts say, as to which storage vendor is the most green.
"It's too early to tell," Nisbet says. The companies all have somewhat different takes on how to cut power costs.
The degree of green won't have a big impact on buying decisions, says Simon Robinson, an analyst with the 451 Group, a research firm.
"It's going to be a check-box feature," he said. "Customers are going to want to see it."
Powering Down
Companies, though, are striving to cut power usage in their data centers and elsewhere. There's not only the cost to run the servers and storage machines, but also the cost of cooling them.
"People are getting bigger and bigger storage systems," said Tony Asaro, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. "All those spinning storage (disks) take a lot of power and create a lot of heat."
Companies should try to use fewer disks to store their exploding reams of data, says Chris Bennett, vice president of core systems at Network Appliance.
"The No. 1 thing (a company) can do with power efficiency is to use less storage," he said.
HP takes that approach with its new offerings. One product uses a technology related to what's known as "thin provisioning." Such software addresses the problem of disk space not being fully used. Thin provisioning software lets physical disk space be used only when it's needed. That way companies don't have to buy more disks until truly needed.
"It reduces the amount of storage" customers must initially buy," said Patrick Eitenbichler, director of marketing for HP's StorageWorks unit.
HP isn't first out with such an approach. Network Appliance introduced a thin provisioning product about three years ago, Bennett says.
EMC also offers thin provisioning for some of its network-based storage. It will add thin provisioning to its core product line by early 2008, says Lesley Ogrodnick, an EMC spokeswoman.
Besides disk-based storage, HP last month unveiled some tape-based storage as a power-saving measure. Once a tape is full, companies can store a tape and access it only when it's needed.
With disk-based storage, those boxes are always plugged in and using some power.
"I always have this image in my head of a piece of data sitting on a disk drive, spinning in circles without ever being accessed," Eitenbichler said. "If I move to tape, it doesn't require electricity to run and it doesn't require cooling."
IBM touts tape as well.
There are other ways of going green. One tool: data de-duplication, which saves disk space by only backing up unique files, not redundant files. An e-mail that's sent to 500 people with the same attachment, for example, doesn't need to be saved more than once.
Many vendors, including EMC and Network Appliance, offer de-duplication.
Perhaps the purest of the green storage offerings are products that use a technology called MAID, for massive array of idle disks. MAID helps use less power by slowing the spinning speed of disks while they aren't being accessed for data retrieval.
Storage companies also offer consulting services to help their customers cut energy costs. EMC launched "energy efficiency services" in December. The unit helps customers better manage and forecast power consumption in data centers.
"Our service professionals evaluate actual customer workloads and configurations," Ogrodnick said in an e-mail.
Analyst Asaro says green storage products and services will eventually catch on.
"I don't think it's had a major impact on business yet," he said. "Going forward, it will."
