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INDUSTRY NEWS


17 June 2008

Datacentre Cooling Costs Increasing Yearly


As the number of spinning disks in external enterprise storage continues to increase, the total amount spent on powering and cooling them is also rising rapidly, with these costs exceeding $1 billion (£513 billion) in 2007, it has been claimed.

According to a new report from IDC, nearly eight times as many disks will be shipped over the next five years (2008-2012) as were shipped in the past 11 years, a trend that the analyst warns will push up powering and cooling costs even further.

It recommended that enterprises employ 'green' strategies, such as 'thin provisioning', data de-duplication and low-power operations, to help reduce the energy expenditure of external disk storage.

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

He advised vendors to do more to promote the use of green storage strategies including datacentre redesigns as well as data consolidation and reduction.

Last month, IT data hosting service provider Rackspace Hosting announced that it has created a new, green datacentre in Berkshire that is completely powered by sustainable energy sources, the most notable of which is Britain's largest dedicated bio-mass energy plant.<br/>

© 2006 Adfero Ltd.

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