What Is Green Storage and How Can Your Data Center Implement It?

How green is your data center storage? If that's not a question you can easily answer – or if it’s one you’ve never even thought about asking – it may be time to evaluate the role of storage infrastructure in your data center sustainability profile.

Although storage is not the most important factor in data center sustainability outcomes, it can influence the energy efficiency and environment-friendliness of digital infrastructure facilities in important ways.

To that end, here’s a primer on what green storage means, why it’s important, and how to implement green storage for data centers.

What is Green Storage?

Green storage refers to digital storage systems that are optimized for sustainability. Green storage is typically characterized by:

Importantly, green storage is not a specific type of storage system or media. There are no “green” hard disks, for example. Instead, the concept of green storage refers to taking sustainability into account across all aspects of storage system design, implementation, and management.

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The Role of Storage in Data Center Sustainability

If you haven’t thought about the concept of green storage before, it’s probably because storage systems are not typically at the heart of discussions about data center sustainability.

The major focus of sustainability conversations tends instead to be on compute resources, like CPUs – which makes sense because CPUs are among the most power-hungry components of modern data center hardware. They also produce a lot of heat, which increases the energy consumed by data center cooling systems.

But storage systems, too, can contribute to data center sustainability outcomes in important ways. Storage solutions that are poorly designed from a sustainability perspective may consume more power than necessary, while also causing e-waste.

So, while optimizing compute resources for sustainability should probably be your top priority if you want to implement a greener data center, investing in green storage is a smart next step.

Green storage isn’t about physical media like CDs – it’s about optimizing digital storage systems for energy efficiency and sustainability.

How to Implement Green Storage

Related:On-Premises vs. Cloud Storage: Choosing the Right Solution

Again, green storage is not a specific type of storage hardware or system. You can’t just go out and buy “green storage” hardware.

Instead, implementing green storage requires strategic decisions about how you set up and manage the storage media that your data center workloads depend on. Some of the major considerations include:

1. Choose Energy-Efficient Storage Media

The first step in implementing green storage is choosing energy-efficient disks. The conventional choice for creating storage systems in data centers was using conventional hard drives, which are inexpensive. However, they typically achieve overall lower rates of energy efficiency relative to I/O than solid-state drives (SSDs).

As such, SSDs are usually a better option if you want green storage. Unfortunately, they’re also more expensive. Keep in mind, too, that there are multiple types of SSD-based storage media, and some are more energy-efficient than others. Do your research to determine exactly how much power disks consume before committing to an option.

2. Use Storage Efficiently

You can make your storage system green by keeping it lean and mean – which means eliminating unnecessary data to minimize the amount of storage infrastructure you require. You can also compress data to increase the efficiency of your storage system.

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Going further, if you use strategies like RAID to improve the reliability or performance of your storage system, research the energy-efficiency implications of different RAID setups.

3. Optimize Physical Placement of Storage

The physical arrangement of storage media can affect their power efficiency and length of usable life. If you stuff too many disks into a tight space, you may impede efficient airflow, leading to wasted energy. You might also run your disks hotter than the manufacturers intended, causing them to fail early.

4. Don’t Replace Disks Prematurely

It can be tempting to replace disks long before they reach the end of their usable lives because you are worried that if you don’t, the disks will fail and you’ll lose data. However, it’s important to consider the sustainability implications of throwing out disks when they’re still usable.

Rather than following a generic policy of replacing disks every three or five years, consider replacing disks only when diagnostic tests like S.M.A.R.T. show that they are starting to fail. You can also assign different replacement priority levels to different disks depending on the importance of the data they host. Disks that host production data are likely to benefit more from proactive replacement than those that store archival information.

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Greener Storage as a Step Toward Greener Data Centers

Storage shouldn’t be your first area of focus if you’re seeking to enhance data center sustainability. However, storage is an important resource to optimize from an energy-efficiency and e-waste perspective for businesses that want to make their data center operations as green as possible.

Ultimately, implementing green storage is not all that hard. It boils down to making sustainability-aware decisions about how you design and manage storage systems.