Vendors argue that companies need to manage data more efficiently

The vast majority of UK IT departments claim that storage vendors should be doing more to improve the energy efficiency of their products, according to a survey by storage management software company BridgeHead Software.

BridgeHead's annual Information Lifecycle Management Audit found that 84 per cent of respondents want more energy efficient storage products.

Some 60 per cent also indicated that their own organisations are interested in finding more energy efficient ways of managing data storage resources.

The research revealed that the problem does not lie solely at door of the vendors, as 70 per cent agreed that better management of their storage resources could reduce energy consumption.

Just over six out of 10 organisations in the survey admitted that between 30 to 50 per cent of data on their primary disks is unlikely ever to be accessed again.

Concern over power costs was the most common reason for UK organisations to improve the energy efficiency of their storage, cited by 73 per cent of respondents, followed by concern for the environment (57 per cent) and power capacity worries(35 per cent).

In the US the reasons were power costs (67 per cent of respondents) followed by power capacity (59 per cent) and environmental concerns (35 per cent).

"There is nothing wrong with demanding more energy-efficient solutions from vendors, but many organisations could improve energy efficiency by cutting the data they hold on spinning disk," said Tony Cotterill, chief executive at BridgeHead.

"While they may need to keep this data for legal or regulatory reasons, they can save power by taking it off to tape, optical disk, removable disk or other systems which do not consume power unless being accessed.

"Organisations should be looking at defining and implementing archiving rules to move everything off primary storage that is old or infrequently accessed."

The report found that, although many companies are increasingly archiving data for compliance and disaster recovery reasons, few are considering how to optimise this for energy efficiency or cost considerations.

BridgeHead reckons that the majority of green benefits will only be seen if companies move away from point solutions or isolated archive appliances.

The company recommends taking an enterprise-wide approach which looks at archiving all data types across the whole organisation.