Green Storage Just Beginning in SMBs

Growing quantities of data and rising energy prices are forcing medium-sized businesses to consider the energy efficiency of their storage systems – in theory at least. In practice, electricity use is still not an essential criterium for the purchase of data storage. In this case, the deciding factors are the reliability or price of a system. This is one of the conclusions reached by a survey conducted jointly by the PR Agency Fleishman-Hillard and the specialist magazine speicherguide.de. The survey was carried out among 262 managers and IT specialists in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), in cooperation with the market research institute Smart-Research.

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Green Storage – existing awareness
When asked about the value they ascribe to Green Storage in their businesses, over half of the IT specialists asked (52%) answered that environmentally friendly storage technology was of ‘medium importance’ to them. Around a fifth (18%) designated it as important and 5% said very important. The latter even already buy specifically ‘green’ storage solutions. On the other hand, Green Storage plays no role in 19% of the companies.

The necessary perspective is lacking on energy costs
Almost half of those questioned (49%) estimate that the proportion of the energy use of the entire IT department used by the IT-Storage equipment is less than 20%; a further 20% of companies estimated the proportion was anything up to 50%. On the other hand, 21% of the participants openly admit that they do not know the level of energy use of their IT-Storage infrastructure. A third (33%) of those questioned in the survey were not able to estimate an amount in Euros for the annual electricity cost of their storage infrastructure, which shows that to date the topic of energy efficiency has played a minor role at best in the awareness of those responsible.

Energy use plays a subordinate role
in purchasing decisions
In view of the difficulties in calculating energy cost factors, it is not surprising that energy use as a criterium in purchasing data storage equipment came seventh out of a possible eight considerations for 12% of companies. Reliability, in contrast, was chosen as by far the most important criterium by 77%, followed by high-performance and price with 49% each. After this, come scalability (34%), ease of use (29%) and whether the technology is safeguarded for the future. The administrative costs brought up the rear with 5% in this question.

Karl Fröhlich, Editor-in Chief and publisher of speicherguide.de, explains it thus: “Admittedly, Green Storage has been on the tip of everybody’s tongues for some time now and many businesses are sensibilized to it because of this. However, it will be a long time before this awareness means that energy use and energy efficiency are important factors in practice.”

Robert Belle, Associate Director and leader of the study at Fleishman Hillard, adds: “From the point of view of a company, storage solutions should be high-performance, reliable and reasonably priced. So that the calculation does not become a pipe dream, it is precisely medium-sized companies, who are sensitive to costs, who should take the costs of electricity and administration into account in their planning.”

Increasing efficiency:
consolidation and virtualisation have the largest potential
Even when storage management strategies such as virtualisation are actually put in place by only a third of those asked (29%), more than half of the participants (57%) believed that this approach would reduce the energy costs of their IT-Storage structure. Just as many hope to reap savings from the consolidation of existing storage systems. The expectations regarding data duplication, or (further) development of a storage network is also very concrete: 40 to 50% anticipate a tangible savings opportunity.

The IT-Storage Projects of the coming 12 months
The fact that a considerable proportion of those surveyed from medium-sized companies actually want to use the possibilities of the mentioned storage strategies, shows the intended direction of the IT-Storage projects planned over the next twelve months. Along with ‘Evergreens’ such as data-recovery (49%) and the obtaining of shorter backup times (44%), proceeding with energy saving opportunities such as storage consolidation (45%), storage virtualisation (37%), as well as data duplication (33%), is in the front of the minds of many businesses. Revision-safe archiving, as well as the high availability of data are each on the to-do list of 38% of the participants.

Study Profile