Storage and Sustainability

This report, published on June 2023, was written by Mitch Lewis, research associate, Evaluator Group.

Data Storage and Sustainability

Sustainability as a Selection Criteria
The factors involved in IT purchasing decisions vary from organization to organization as well as between industries and use cases, however, in general there are a few criteria that are consistently weighed to some degree in all storage decisions. Traditionally the criteria consist of some combination of cost, scalability, and performance.

Specific feature sets, vendor relationships, and other criteria also often play a role, but it is the previous 3 factors that are often at the core of storage decisions. In turn, storage vendors typically heavily emphasize these 3 areas across marketing materials, sales tools, and test validations.

More recently, sustainability has also entered the discussion as a key criterion for IT decisions. Global concern over environmental issues and the impact of CO² emissions on the climate have been growing for some time. Social and in some cases legislative pressures are now causing organizations to consider their own practices with regards to environmental impact and sustainability. While pressure to increase sustainability and decrease emissions goes well beyond IT, data centers find themselves under particular scrutiny due to high energy usage that contributes significantly towards global emissions.

With an increased focus on environmental concerns, IT organizations are adding sustainability into their core set of selection criteria alongside cost, performance, and scalability. In return, storage vendors have added additional focus on providing greater sustainability in their products and amplifying their messages around the topic.

IT Sustainability Concerns
Sustainability as a discipline goes well beyond environmental concerns, but in the case of data centers the focus is typically related to environmental impact. With data centers being identified as a key area of environmental concern, IT vendors and organizations need to understand the underlying factors that are contributing to the problem. The sustainability challenges faced by IT do not have a single, perfect solution, but by understanding the key contributing factors, vendors can craft more sustainable offerings and IT organizations can understand what changes to make in their datacenters. In general, there are three key areas that are considered when discussing sustainability in the datacenter.

Energy Efficiency
The main concern regarding the environmental impact of IT is large scale energy usage. Compute and storage resources both require power to operate, and in many cases the amount of power used is non-trivial. There are a number of factors that contribute to energy usage in a datacenter, from the workloads run to the hardware used.

A major contributor to datacenter energy consumption is the processor used. While CPUs utilize plenty of energy on their own, the situation can become even more energy demanding when GPUs and other accelerators are added to the mix. From a sustainability perspective, this becomes concerning with the rise of GPU intensive workloads such as AI/ML and HPC, as well as the development of specialized accelerator cards such as DPUs. Further adding to the energy usage are the cooling systems – often energy inefficient fans – that are required to keep these systems from overheating.

When considering storage devices, the choice between SSDs and HDDs can also have a significant impact on energy efficiency. Typically, SSDs are more energy efficient than HDDs. With continued development of solid state technology, such as QLC, denser SSD devices are being adopted which can provide greater capacity in a smaller physical footprint – reducing the number of physical systems requiring power.

Sourcing Materials
A second concern around IT sustainability comes from the materials and processes used to source servers and storage systems. While these systems are critical to IT organizations to support their daily operations, they are reliant on rare materials that are mined from the earth. Mining often has serious sustainability concerns as the practices may be harmful to the environment as well as the workers involved. Sourcing of technology systems requires greater transparency and validation throughout its entire supply chain to ensure that the methods are as sustainable as possible.

E-waste
Just as there are concerns surrounding the sourcing of materials, there is also a large environmental concern regarding the replacement and disposal of systems. Both storage and compute resources require periodic refreshes to stay current with the latest technology advancements and avoid wear out. While these refreshes provide organizations with greater technical capabilities, they also contribute to e-waste. The consistent cycle of replacing technology requires further sourcing of materials for the replacement systems and can be additionally harmful to the environment if the original hardware is not properly handled and recycled.

Sustainability Strategies

Renewable Energy
With carbon emissions due to energy usage being the largest environmental concern surrounding datacenters, an obvious solution is to power data centers with renewable energy resources such as wind or solar that will not contribute CO² emissions. A complete overhaul of energy sources, however, is not a simple switch, and is likely not a possibility for most organizations. There is also concern over the reliability of such green energy sources, especially in certain regions or climates. For some larger organizations however, a shift to incorporate green energy sources may be a possibility. Greater access to renewable energy may also become more readily available in the future as wind, solar, and other technologies continue to mature.

Public Cloud
A common strategy proposed to reduce the environmental footprint of data centers is to utilize the public cloud. In some instances, the assumption may be that if data is not located in an organization’s on-premises data center, then they have absolved themselves from the environmental responsibility attached to it. Whether or not this assumption would hold up under legal regulations, the approach of shifting responsibility is not conducive to making substantial progress in a global sustainability effort. While data may be moved out of the organization’s data center, there is still an energy and hardware requirement taken on by the cloud provider.

There is, however, some benefit to offloading data to public cloud providers. Due to their large nature, cloud providers are able to operate their data centers with more efficiency than those of small organizations. Many of the major cloud providers have also made a commitment to utilizing renewable energy. In the same way that an organization can utilize the public cloud to offload management of infrastructure, they can offload their energy use to a cloud that utilizes renewable energy.

Monitoring Tools
For organizations to take meaningful action on their energy consumption, it is crucial for them to have visibility into their current usage. To do so, organizations can use applications that monitor the energy use of certain systems and workloads. This is helpful to discover any anomalies or inefficiencies, as well as for organizations to ensure they are meeting their energy goals.

Storage Devices
The storage devices used can impact the overall energy efficiency of a storage system. SSDs are typically more power efficient than HDDs, primarily due to their lack of mechanical parts. SSDs have increasingly gained adoption for performance reasons with HDDs maintaining their status as a more economic option. Further technological and economic developments, such as high capacity QLC devices and lower prices, alongside the environmental advantages allow for SSDs to expand their reach into use cases previously reserved for HDDs.

The development of increasingly dense flash devices also offers increased sustainability by providing greater capacity in a smaller physical footprint by reducing the physical materials and energy required for additional hardware. This is especially important in storage appliances that add additional energy consuming compute resources as capacity is scaled out.

Tape media may also be used to achieve energy reduction due to its removability, however tape is limited in its performance and should be reserved for appropriate use cases such as data archival.

Data Reduction
Storage requires power, and the more data that is stored the more energy will be required. Data reduction technologies such as de-dupe and compression can be used to reduce the overall storage capacity and have a significant impact on the energy consumption and physical footprint of storage systems.

Data Management
Management of data stored can be used to optimize energy efficiency. Data management tools can provide insights and visibility into organizations’ data and storage environments to provide a greater understanding of the data, how it is being used, and where it is being stored. With greater visibility and understanding of data, organizations can make informed decisions to enhance the energy efficiency of their storage. This may include deleting unnecessary or redundant data, archiving data to cloud or tape, or moving data to where it can be used most efficiently. As sustainability continues to be a key criterion for IT, data management tools are likely to add more capabilities to monitor and enhance the sustainability and energy efficiency of stored data. Further advances in automation within these tools will provide even greater efficiency as sustainability related tasks can become automated processes.

Energy Efficiency SLAs
For organizations consuming storage via a service offering, some vendors have included SLAs specific to the energy usage of the solution. This allows organizations to plan for an expected level of energy usage that meets their requirements, just as they would with similar SLAs for performance.

Controller Refresh Programs
Programs that provide a periodic of refresh storage controllers have become a popular offering with most large IT vendors offering some variation. These programs have gained popularity from IT organizations by providing updated performance, but the programs also offer a strategy for mitigating e-waste. While both compute and storage devices will require periodic refresh cycles, the timeline for doing so is not the same. Controllers are typically refreshed somewhere around every 3 years, while storage devices may not need to be refreshed for much longer. Advances in flash technology have extended the lifespan of some SSDs up to 10 years. By providing in-place controller upgrades, organizations can separate the technology refresh cycles of controllers and storage devices and reduce the e-waste that would be involved by refreshing storage alongside compute.

Current Vendor Approaches
With sustainability becoming a major concern, several of the leading IT vendors have taken various positions regarding the sustainability of their offerings. The following vendor examples are provided to demonstrate such approaches; however, it is not intended as an exhaustive list of all vendor sustainability initiatives.

NetApp
It has been active in providing both information regarding the sustainability of its products as well as tools to help organizations improve sustainability. It has released product lifecycle reports that estimate the carbon footprint of its appliances over time. These reports estimate the impact of both the product usage over time, as well as from individual components, assembly, packaging, and end of life. It has additionally committed to informing customers of sustainability metrics by developing sustainability-oriented pre-sales tools to incorporate organization’s sustainability goals early into the purchasing process, just as the vendor would other key metrics such as performance or scalability.

For existing NetApp deployments, it has created a heat and energy monitoring tool that is built into ActiveIQ. It has additionally developed a sustainability dashboard that provides a sustainability score and recommended actions into its BlueXP management platform. It has also included an energy efficiency SLA in its Keystone offerings and offers a controller upgrade program.

Pure Storage
Its approach to sustainability has been focused around the energy efficiency and density of its DirectFlash devices. Pure, as an all-flash storage vendor, has specifically targeted the energy efficiency advantages that flash devices have over spinning disks. Its development of increasingly dense SSDs combined with data reduction technology creates a sustainability argument around consolidation and Pure has built interactive calculator tools to demonstrate this. Pure has additionally launched a //E line of its appliances targeted at economic and energy efficiency – a rival to HDD based storage – that Pure labels “Green Flash” storage. It has also included an energy efficiency SLA in its Evergreen One subscription and offers controller refreshes with its Evergreen Forever program.

Weka
Its major application areas – AI, ML, and HPC – are among the largest contributors to IT’s sustainability issue. Weka has responded by launching a Sustainable AI Initiative to highlight how its technology can help address the issue, as well as bring awareness to the industry. Its strategy to reducing the carbon footprint of AI is centered mostly around increasing the efficiency of GPUs. By providing data to GPUs quicker, the firm is capable of reducing wasteful idle time. it has additionally joined a partnership with One Tree Planted to plant 10 trees for every petbyte of Weka storage sold.

Vast Data
It has promoted the sustainability and energy saving characteristics of several of the capabilities of its Universal Storage solution. The key argument to its sustainability claims is the solution’s disaggregated architecture which allows storage and compute resources to be scaled separately. By doing so, storage can be added when needed without adding energy demanding compute resources if additional performance isn’t a requirement. The firm also positions itself as a consolidation option by using dense QLC SSDs and offering its similarity-based data reduction functionality.

The company additionally states that e-waste can be reduced due to the longevity of its QLC devices, which it backs up with a 10-year guarantee. Its commitment to offering a sustainable solution also includes a sustainability guarantee in which they will buy carbon offset credits if a customer can achieve more efficient results with a comparable solution.

Dell
It has focused on increasing the energy efficiency of its offerings and testing the efficiency vs. benchmarks such as ENERGY STAR and EPEAT. Its storage systems also provide consolidation through the use of high-density flash devices and data reduction techniques. Dell’s Future Proof Storage program provides a technology refresh and recycling program to reduce e-waste.

Challenges
The overall movement to improve the sustainability of IT is a positive step in combatting environmental concerns, however it is not without its challenges. The increased focus on sustainability is relatively new, and as such, there is still uncertainty around certain areas.

For IT organizations, there is a lack of clarity regarding regulations of data center sustainability. It remains unclear what regulations IT organizations will need to follow (if any) and how they will be enforced. IT organizations are also subject to inconsistent and potentially misleading marketing from vendors. As a recently prioritized criteria, sustainability is a key marketing message for many vendors, however there is a lack of standard tools and benchmarks. This leaves some comparisons and claims around energy efficiency and other sustainability metrics to appear ambiguous or inconsistent.

The IT industry also faces the challenge of new energy intensive workloads. While the industry begins to take steps to address IT’s large impact on the environment, advances in AI and HPC are requiring more data, more resources, and more power. While technological advances are made, the industry will need to simultaneously advance its sustainability efforts to keep pace.

Future Outlook
The recent trend of sustainability as a key metric in IT will likely continue for the foreseeable future. IT organizations are likely to prioritize energy efficiency in their purchasing process, especially if they are facing new environmental regulations. In return, IT vendors are likely to increase their messaging around sustainability including new marketing materials, energy efficiency calculators and tools, benchmarking, and lifecycle analysis reports. As these materials continue to develop, it would be beneficial for the industry to settle on standards that provide consistency and transparency around the matter.

Sustainability will also likely impact future technology developments including denser storage devices, more efficient power supplies, and other hardware components. Software developments may include increased data reduction functionality, energy monitoring and reporting, and further integration of sustainability metrics in data management tools. Cloud providers will likely continue to migrate to renewable energy sources, positioning themselves as a way to offload energy usage.

While IT has long been a significant contributor to energy usage and carbon emissions, the recent push towards sustainability is a promising development in reducing environmental impact. The industry faces a number of challenges in route to a more sustainable future, however, early steps are being taken by several IT vendors to assist organizations with their sustainability goals. By implementing many of the sustainability strategies available today, and continuing to implement future advances, IT organizations can make a significant impact in the overall sustainability of IT.