Data growth is at an all-time high driven by new technologies, services and use cases like edge computing, AI/ML, smart video and gaming to name a few. While at the same time, data compliance regulations are requiring companies and businesses to retain more data for longer periods of time, in certain prescribed ways — locally, regionally or country-wide.
In response, many organizations are adopting new types of technology to help operate their data centers more efficiently, consume fewer resources and become better stewards to the planet.
The more data that can be stored on a single hard drive, reduces the amount of storage devices a company needs, allowing organizations to reduce their power and cooling costs which plays a critical role in helping data centers operate greener.
More data = more value and more challenges
A recent IDC study predicts the Global DataSphere will more than double in size from 2022 to 2026. This equates to more data being created, captured and replicated than ever before. More data equals more potential business value — for AI/ML, deeper insights and developing new revenue streams, as examples. As a result, data generation is outpacing global storage capacity. It’s also creating environmental challenges.
Every digital action in the world runs through a data center somewhere and demands a lot of energy. Unless the power is coming from wind, solar, hydro or clean energy, it has a carbon footprint. Until a few years ago, companies were not asking questions like: where are your services hosted? Now, they’re paying more attention to determine which technologies to use and companies to partner with when storing their information in a more sustainable manner.
Data centers play a key role in helping companies meet their ESG goals, so they must find ways to reduce power consumption, emissions and e-waste. Today’s data centers are one of the largest consumers of energy resources in the world. The Office for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy estimates that, altogether, data centers are responsible for 2% of the total US electricity use.
For hyperscalers, cloud service providers (CSPs), co-location and enterprises, scaling their data storage capacity efficiently and cost-effectively to meet data growth in an environmentally friendly way is paramount to their success. These factors are putting pressure on data center managers to provide unwavering reliability and SLA performance at the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO), all while meeting sustainability goals. In fact, lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) and reducing their environmental impact influences almost every decision data center managers make.
Brad Warbiany is the Director of HDD Technical Marketing at Western Digital.
High-capacity HDDs preserve footprint and lower TCO
Technology is under pressure too. Today’s hard disk drives (HDDs) must hold more data in the same 3.5-inch footprint and be able to scale for exponential data growth, while also providing lower TCO. HDD technology innovations like helium-sealed drives, OptiNAND™ technology, UltraSMR and energy-assist drives have all contributed to delivering improved capacity, performance, low power and reliability at scale for the world’s largest cloud and enterprise data center customers.
They have learned that moving to the highest capacity, low-power HDDs can improve storage density, lower overall power and cooling costs and reduce floor space. Essentially, higher capacity HDDs lets businesses store the same amount of data in less space while consuming less power.
For example, using 22TB HDDs versus 16TB HDDs to deploy 2PB of storage would require 27% fewer servers and use 26% lower energy consumption in watts/TB idle to store the same amount of data. There is also less infrastructure and maintenance costs by eliminating the extra servers. This ultimately lessens the number of HDDs a business has to maintain.
Businesses need sustainable data storage
Corporate climate commitments and sustainability initiatives are critical to long-term business success. Data centers play a key role in helping (or hurting) businesses meet their environmental goals, emphasizing the importance of reducing power and energy consumption, emissions and e-waste to become more eco-friendly.
High-capacity HDDs can help. While the demands for data storage increase, increasing HDD capacity in the same physical form factor and without increasing power consumption improves the emissions intensity of a data center—the emissions per TB of data stored. With fewer servers needed, less floor space consumed, reduced cooling needs, and less e-waste generated to store a given quantity of data, this efficiency gain allows data centers to better meet their emissions and sustainability goals.
For example, Dropbox synchronizes files to the cloud for over 700 million users across a spectrum of business and personal customers. The company implemented high-capacity SMR HDDs in its data centers resulting in more than 20% cost efficiency overall and reducing its footprint for better energy-efficiency compared to the last generation storage design.
Unlocking potential with data
The future is ripe with business potential. The possibilities are fueled by data generated from intelligent devices, powered by the cloud, connected by high-performance networks and running through data centers. To fully realize the value, however, businesses must be able to extract strategic insights from a massive amount of information.
This means the need to store, transmit, process and analyze data is more important than ever. Every bit stored can play a role in a company’s operations and impact the bottom line. Capacity, TCO, energy use, sustainability and innovation are all intertwined.
Improvements in HDD technology, for example, will give hyperscalers and enterprises the reliable, cost-effective and low-power storage devices they need to pave the way for more sustainable data centers and, thereby, a chance to unlock data’s true potential responsibly.
