Issue of the Week: Green Computing: It’s About the Data Stupid

By Doug Barney

Finally someone has come out with a logical justification for something I have been talking about for yearsgetting a handle on our out-of-control storage!

Think about your company. What happens when disks start to exceed their thresholds? Why buy more disks, arrays, NAS, or even plunge into the complex, you-can-never-turn-back world of storage area networks (SAN).

End users rarely clean out their old junk. And IT, busy with other problems, simply backs up this data whether it is the CEO’s budget or a gallery of Pam Anderson JPEGs. And to be safe (compliance laws you know), much of this is backed up several times and ultimately archivedso now we have enough copies of the Pam Anderson JPEG for a whole high school hockey team.

This all costs money, and while disks are indeed getting cheaper, the unfortunate fact is it costs far more to manage storage than to buy it.

I have long argued that end users and IT should clean up their storage act, purge useless old data, free up some space, and save a few dollars. And as anyone with kids knows, it’s hard to find anything in a messy room. Messy disks are the same way. Junk data often obscures the stuff we really care about.

Storage gurus now have my back on this one. It isn’t the expense, or the difficulty of finding an important needle in your storage haystackit’s all about the planet.

At the recent Storage Decisions Conference in New York City, two storage organizations agreed to work together on The Green Data Project (greendataproject.org). It hopes to reduce the amount of junk our shops must store, and thus reduce greenhouse gases.

According to the Data Management Institute and Archive Mangement.orgstorage devices will soon exceed servers as our number-one user of IT electricity.

By reducing junk data, and by archiving what is rarely used, we can get off the cycle of buying more and more disks every time one gets clogged. Saving the planet is great. Saving money and cleansing our data ain’t so bad either.

When was the last time you cleansed your data? Send your thoughts on green computing and green data to Doug Barney at barneymailto:[email protected].