The Data Centre Challenge: Powering up sustainable data storage

As demand for compute power surges, concerns are growing around the rising energy consumption of data centres. With the number of data centres in the UK set to increase by almost a fifth in the next five years, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) is already projecting a four-fold increase in the sector’s electricity consumption by 2030. A figure that could rise, following the recent announcement that US tech giants plan to invest billions of dollars into a UK AI infrastructure initiative that includes a number of new high density data centres.

This isn’t just a UK-specific concern. According to the International Energy Agency, the global electricity demand from data centres is set to more than double over the next five years – a growth that is being fuelled by the rapid adoption of AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and the cloud.

Against this backdrop, business leaders are now hyper-focused on achieving a key goal: reducing the energy consumption of their data centre infrastructure.

The data centre conundrum: balancing data growth and sustainability

Central to the data centre power crisis is the meteoric rise in data volumes driven by digital transformation and AI. Sustainably storing all this data is proving increasingly problematic for data centres reliant on legacy servers and storage media which operate continuously and at high power levels, regardless of workload. In addition to this, data centres must also contend with widespread backup systems that further ramp up overall energy consumption and necessitate the use of additional cooling and environmental controls.

The data storage challenge is being further compounded by a new phenomenon: the data hoarding imperative. Motivated by a belief that any or all data could prove of value in the future, many businesses are now adopting a ‘save everything’ mindset. As a result, they are holding onto greater volumes of data for longer, with data being stockpiled and stored indefinitely.

This new behaviour is having a profound impact on data centre storage profiles. By 2030, it’s anticipated that around 70% of stored data will be ‘cold data’ that, while rarely accessed may still be required. By contrast, the remaining 30% will be classified as ‘hot data’ that needs fast and frequent access.

Clearly, preserving and storing high volumes of ‘standby’ data on power-hungry devices represents a substantial and growing energy burden for data centres. It also has far-reaching consequences for business leaders who will need to reconfigure their data architectures for greater storage sustainability as energy efficiency rules for data centres continue to tighten.

Rethinking storage for the modern era

Organisations are at a crossroads when it comes to balancing the desire to extract maximum value from their data against the cost and sustainability implications of storing it indefinitely. 

With data volumes increasing exponentially on a yearly basis, there are some strategic steps that data centre leaders can take to address this issue: 

• Step 1 – Conduct an audit of data usage and workflows and categorise storage needs. This will enable IT teams to understand what data is being stored, where it is stored, and how it is being used.

• Step 2 – Armed with these insights, implement hybrid architectures that will intelligently allocate data across efficient workflows, based on access or criticality to significantly improve sustainability performance.

• Step 3 – Migrate standby data to a more energy-efficient solution such as tape, to achieve substantial cost and power usage savings.

By initiating a modern tiered storage architecture approach, organisations can implement an active archiving strategy that ensures data is readily accessible across multiple storage types and locations. In this scenario, less time critical or cold data can be moved from expensive and energy intensive tiers of storage to lower cost and more sustainable high density tape storage for long term retention. 

Offering a robust and scalable solution for archiving massive volumes of infrequently accessed – but essential – data, adopting low-power tape storage represents an ideal solution for offloading data that does not need to be readily available but might be accessed at some point in the future. It also offers huge potential to cut energy consumption.

Unlike hard disk drives, tape drives use little power when not reading or writing tape cartridges and consume zero energy when sitting in an automated library. In addition to which, tape libraries require a less intensive cooling infrastructure compared to disk or flash arrays. To put this into context, converting just 33% of the world’s installed disk storage to tape would potentially save around 200 hundred million megawatt hours each year.

By adopting low-power tape storage for their data archiving, organisations will be able to reduce both the cost and environmental impact of their data centres without having to compromise on their data retention needs.

Rethinking storage choices for a more sustainable future

Energy efficiency will continue to be a top priority for data centres, especially as data volumes flourish. There is little doubt that emerging technologies, including advanced cooling methods, improved resource management, and more efficient hardware will all play a key role in reducing the power consumption and carbon footprint of data centres. So too will storage transformation.

With organisations storing more data than before, a new and more targeted approach to the long-term storage of data will be required. By implementing data classification, automated tiering, and intelligent hybrid storage solutions alongside tape technologies, organisations will be able to better manage their expanding data sets in a more sustainable way.