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Reducing IT’s Carbon Footprint via Tape While Improving Cybersecurity and Protecting the Bottom Line

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By Drew Robb, Guest Blogger

There is increasing pressure around the world to reduce emissions and lower mankind’s carbon footprint. It is up to the IT sector to do its part, and that means considerably lowering power usage. But that is easier said than done when you consider the statistics.

IDC predicts we will arrive at the mind-boggling figure of 175 zettabytes of data in the digital universe within 4 years. 175 ZB? Consider how long it takes most users to fill a one TB drive. Well, 175 ZB equates to approximately 175 billion TB drives.

The problem is this: how do you reduce IT’s overall power draw in the face of a massive and continual upsurge in data storage? Once 175 ZB of data exists, there is no possibility of containing electrical usage if the vast majority of storage is sitting on hard disk drives (HDDs). The only solution is to cure the industry’s addiction to disk.

Here are the numbers. Data centers alone account for close to 2% of all power consumed in the U.S., about 73 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2020. That is enough to set off the alarm bells. Yet tremendous progress has been made over the past two decades in terms of data center efficiency. When power consumption in data centers soared by 90% between 2000 and 2005 period, the industry acted forcefully. The rate of growth slowed to 24% between 2005 and 2010 and then fell to less than 5% for the entire decade between 2010 and 2020. That’s miraculous when you consider that it was achieved during a period that represented the largest surge in storage growth in history. Smartphones, streaming video, texting, multi-core processors, analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud storage, big data, and other IT innovations demanded the retention of more and more data.

Big strides were made in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE – the ratio of data center power consumption divided by the power usage). Data centers have largely done a good job in improving the efficiency of their operations. But the one area lagging badly behind is storage efficiency.

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A New Age Dawns for Digital Archives: 2020 State of Industry Report

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The Active Archive Alliance recently released its 2020 Active Archive and the State of the Industry Report, which highlights the increased demand for new data management strategies as well as benefits and use cases for active archive solutions.

Here are a few takeaways from the report:

  • Today’s data demands an intelligent archive solution that leverages the advanced capabilities of data movement technology and scale-out hardware to realize its fast-increasing value.
  • The growing reliance on archival data makes it ground zero for unlocking game-changing data strategies.
  • New applications, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) with billions of nodes and boosted by the arrival of 5G networks, will help fuel insatiable demand for more intelligent active archives.
  • Key usage cases for active archiving tell the real story, starting with healthcare and high-performance computing (HPC) in life sciences.
  • Other top use cases include security, business efficiency and continuity, media and entertainment, and IoT, including autonomous vehicles.

Sponsors of the report include Active Archive Alliance members Atempo, Fujifilm Recording Media USA, IBM, Iron Mountain, Harmony Healthcare IT, MediQuant, PoINT Software & Systems, Quantum, Qumulo, QStar Technologies, Spectra Logic, StrongBox Data Solutions and Western Digital.

You can read the full report here.

For more information on the Active Archive Alliance visit: www.activearchive.com.

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Managing The World’s Hyperscale Data Growth

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While backup remains an active use case for tape due to its value for fast site restores and anti-cybercrime, tape’s future growth opportunities lie in many new and emerging areas. With the Internet, cloud, big data, compliance and IoT waves promising unprecedented data growth, the timing for advanced tape functionality couldn’t be better.

Check out this new white paper from Horison Information Strategies to learn how the tape renaissance is ushering in the era of modern tape.

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