Software for Green Telecom

Consider a data-intensive sector like telecom that is booming with the entry
of new players, and, in the mirror image, consider the burgeoning customer
information that these players deal with on a regular basis. With fierce
competition and the need to increase their subscriber base while sustaining
their market share, these telecom companies are investing heavily in IT
infrastructure. Telecom companies are in fact one of the largest investors in
technology and consequently are the biggest markets for storage, where the
maximum potential exists.

This sudden metamorphosis in the telecom industry has been brought about by
the advent of wireless technology, the Internet, convergence of data, voice and
media, and industry consolidations driven by mergers and acquisitions. As a
result, the industry has had to face a number of challenges, including growth in
regulatory requirements.

With data explosion and increasing storage requirements by the telecom
industry, data centers are the worst hit as they are most affected in terms of
greater loads. Data centers continue to require additional hardware to meet
their business needs that in turn increases power consumption and cooling
requirements.

But here the mirror image differs a bit, since data centers are running out
of power as governmental and environmental regulations are increasing alongside
an increasing cost-per-watt, making power even more expensive. This is a cause
for concern for telecom operators that plan to reduce their energy use and
carbon footprints and position themselves as a 'green' company.

Consequently, a growing number of these telecom companies have found the use
of software as a solution. By way of switching to software to manage data
storage and growth they reduce their hardware power consumption and cooling
needs.

Some areas where telecom players can reduce their energy consumption and
bring in greening include:

Requirements of Power

In a November 2006 Gartner study, 50% of data centers reported that they
could foresee insufficient power and cooling capacity by 2008.

Worse, power is not cheap nor is it getting any cheaper. Large organizations
spend between 4-8%, and sometimes as much as 10% of their IT budgets on energy.
Gartner has also predicted that this expenditure will rise by up to four times
within the next five years.

To address these issues, companies are utilizing low power servers and
standby power management software and are improving power supply efficiency.
Many are also leveraging virtualization to address a small portion of the
problem. Indeed, using more energy-efficient servers is an effective approach to
energy conservation. Yet, as enterprises buy these servers, they are faced with
another challenge: migrating enterprise data agilely to newer devices and
subsystems while maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

And this is where the good news begins. By using software that enables
organizations to improve storage utilization, deploy storage tiering, and use
hardware more efficiently; telecom companies can create energy efficiencies in
the data center and meet established response time levels.

Provisioning Storage

Telecom players operate according to predetermined service level agreements
(SLAs). These SLAs may specify how accessible specific data should be, the
duration it should be retained for and how quickly it must be made available
during peak periods. Data that experiences high read, write, and update
activity, sometimes referred to as transaction data, often requires high
performance storage. Data that does not experience high activity, sometimes
referred to as non-transaction data; typically can reside on lower performance
and more power efficient storage.

Yet, in practice, the majority of data is non-transaction data stored on
expensive, high-performance, and power-consuming disks that have relatively
modest capacities. By identifying and then migrating non-transaction data to the
appropriate lower performance disks, organizations can save power and energy.
The lower consumed watts per gigabyte ratio of these high capacity, lower
performance disks and disk systems can save substantial energy use.

Today's dynamic storage tiering solutions provide continuous migration
support for file system data, using automated methods that respond to changing
conditions. Using such a solution in combination with a scheduled data migration
service for both file system data and data contained within database structures
gives organizations effective enterprise data migration capabilities between
tiers. Better yet, analysis tools can monitor file system activity and
distinguish files that are active from files that are inactive and, therefore,
are eligible for archiving or migration to more energy efficient storage
devices.

Telecom players can also reduce power consumption by identifying duplicate
data; these companies often retain too many data copies. In fact, a typical
organization may have between 10 and 30 copies of each production data byte.
Needless to say, many of these copies are no longer needed, are misplaced or
even worse, the enterprise doesn't even know they still exist. Clearly, reducing
the number of data copies reduces storage capacity requirements and storage
power consumption. Once reduced, snapshots and other copies from high
performance disks can be moved to lower performance disks.

Admittedly, because of continuing data growth, any existing data storage
subsystem will eventually exceed available capacity unless more capacity is made
available, and the data center may not have enough space or electric power to
support expanded storage capacity. At this point, many enterprises begin to
consider building a new data center that can easily cost tens or hundreds of
millions of dollars over time.

But a more economical solution could be to leverage MAID (massive array of
inactive disks) technology, which consumes a small fraction of the electric
power used by lower performance storage systems that house non-transactional
data. MAID storage subsystems power-off idle disks and power them back on when
an application needs access to dormant data. This gives enterprises a third
energy-efficient data storage tier for migrating data.

While hardware power and cooling requirements are the source of many data
center energy problems, software can help remediate them. In fact, some vendors
contend that their software can help customers reduce data storage energy
consumption by as much as 50% and total data center energy consumption by as
much as 25%.

Reducing electrical power consumption will likely remain an enterprise
imperative. By improving storage utilization, deploying storage tiering, and
using hardware more efficiently, organizations can significantly reduce their
data center power consumption and cooling requirements.

Vishal Dhupar

The author is MD, Symantec India

vadmail@cybermedia.co.in