IT professional calls for smarter storage

Smarter storage is also more energy-efficient

Seasoned IT professional Tom Trainer is calling upon tech companies to make their data centers more ecologically sustainable by employing two strategies that can reduce energy consumption.

In his report titled The Future of Data Center Storage, Trainer mentions that data storage can account for up to 40 percent of energy consumption in data centers. While this is not a problem for some data centers now, as data begin to accumulate, the cost of maintain their operations can - and likely will - skyrocket if the issue is not addressed.

Trainer proposes two solutions that he says are already being used by industry leaders like IBM and EMC. The first is data deduplication, which involves eliminating redundant data to just one instance. If exact copies of a file exist in one hundred places across the storage network, for example, deduplication would reduce them to one, thereby reducing the power it takes to store the data.

The other method is called thin provisioning, and it saves energy by providing terminals that request information from servers with data on an on-demand basis instead of portioning it out in advance. This gives the network less tasks to power and less data to store.

Data centers are only one facet of the IT industry that is waking up to green technology and sustainable practices. The engineers and IT professionals of the future are in classrooms right now, discussing today's more modern methods and tomorrow's innovations.