IDC Warns of Increasing Power Costs

By Greg McNevin

June 19, 2008: Following a groundbreaking study, the analysts at IDC have issued a somewhat alarming warning that the real cost to power and cool the world’s external storage topped US$1 (AU$1.06) billion in 2007, and judging by storage growth and other factors, this figure is likely to skyrocket.

The firm says that over the next five years the industry will ship nearly eight times what it has over the past 11 years, making increasing power costs inevitable.

With an aggregate worldwide electricity cost of US$0.07 per kilowatt-hour last year, IDC estimates that the total amount spent on powering and cooling these drives exceeded $1 billion in 2007. It says that while predicting the exact cost of electricity is difficult, the direction it will head is certain, and it isn’t down.

The news isn’t all bad, however, as it notes that a number of strategies have and will continue to emerge to help reduce the energy costs associated with external disk storage. Technologies like data deduplication, Solid State Disks (SSDs) and virtualisation are already helping to lower datacentres achieve better “green” ratings, with energy savings being the main way this is achieved.

“As companies continue to add storage capacity at an aggregate rate of over 50 percent per year, the number of spinning disks continues to be a larger part of the overall power and cooling costs within a datacenter,” said David Reinsel, group vice president for IDC Storage and Semiconductors research.

“Vendors must do more to promote and enable a well-rounded green storage strategies that includes datacentre redesign, data consolidation, and data reduction.”

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