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Environmental Considerations We must not forget how environmental considerations weigh into the equation.
A May, 2009 report by iSuppli Corporation stated that the use of Solid State Drives (SSDs) could allow the world's data centers to reduce their cumulative electricity consumption by 166,643 Megawatt Hours (MWH) from 2008 to 2013. This amounts to slightly more than the total electricity generation of the nation of Gambia for the entire year of 2006, according to statistics from the U.S. Government's Energy Information Administration. "SSDs potentially could replace 10% of high-end and high-RPM Hard Disk Drives(HDDs) used in data centers that are 'short stroked' i.e. they are used for very rapid reads and writes of transaction data coming into these drives at fast speeds, rather for storage capacity," explained Krishna Chander, senior analyst for storage systems at iSuppli. In a May, 6, 2009 eWEEK.com article, Chris Preimesberger noted that, "according to most SSD industry analysts, a 10 percent changeover from HDDs to SSDs over the next four years in high-end, high-transactional data centers is a conservative estimate. Some believe that due to current economic conditions and pressure from the public to "get greener," companies are looking to save money on power consumption in any way they can, as quickly as they can. "If the storage market completely eschews rotating mechanical media like HDDs in favor of SSDs, the projected energy saving could jump to 20 times the level described in iSuppli's forecast during the period from 2008 to 2013", Chander noted. In summary, SSDs should be regarded as data center champions that will allow data servers to grow capacity and improve performance in a substantive way, for the greatest TCO and environmental impact. However, mainstream IT might not realize all of the benefits of SSDs for years, unless IT managers across all major applications begin demanding SSD technology, testing it, and launching trial deployments to prove its far-reaching capabilities. |
A 2008 McKinsey report confirmed that data centers are one of the leading global contributors to carbon dioxide and carbon emissions. Accounting for roughly 0.5% of the world's power consumption, they produce more carbon emissions than either Argentina or the Netherlands, ranking just behind the airline industry in total emissions. An equally telling comparison is that the average data center in America consumes more power than 25,000 homes, while all U.S. data centers together use more electricity than all the TVs in the country combined.
