INSRV leads in national green IT project
7 January 2011
Information Services was awarded funding of £50k from JISC to carry out a pilot study into more sustainable data storage.
The project, 'Planet Filestore', has investigated the provision of more energy efficient and cost-effective data storage that also requires less physical space. The results of the project, which completed at the end of 2010, will be relevant to the whole of the international Further and Higher Education community.
Data volumes are growing at an exponential rate in both commercial and academic environments. Typically 80% of files are 'mature' in that they are rarely accessed beyond 60 days from the date they are completed.
Current approaches store most data on expensive and energy-hungry high performance storage, but there are very few requests for this mature, infrequently accessed, data. In many environments it may not be necessary to guarantee instant access to mature data.
Planet Filestore aims to demonstrate significant energy and cost savings by implementing a system to store mature data on lower cost, greener storage. The system automatically identifies the files which are used less often, and then moves them into this green storage, which typically uses lower power high-density disks. These disks have a smaller number of redundant parts than conventional disks, and therefore save energy and resources. All data will still be instantly accessible for users.
The project has explored methods of using this less expensive, more efficient storage, without a discernible loss of service for end users. It is hoped that the pilot will be rolled into INSRV's production systems for demonstration to others, and that the recommendations from Planet Filestore will be used to inform decision-making and sustainable data storage policy in both academic and commercial sectors.
Planet Filestore hopes to save up to 80% of the power currently used for data storage.
Find out more...
Read the results of the Planet Filestore project