Put that Old Data in Cold Storage
Digital data creation is exploding faster than a YouTube viral video. With emerging markets joining the networked world and with the spectacular growth in stored data, there’s a new demand for ways to store both old and new data.
How much is digital data expanding? Facebook hosts over 240 billion photos. Every day, 350 million more are uploaded. Imagine how many embarrassing photos your mom puts up of you, then multiply it by 349 million. Per day. That’s a lot of incriminating photos to store. After a while, these photos become outdated, making it unnecessary to host them in the same datacenters as more frequently accessed data. And that’s just Facebook photos. What about videos, emails, security logs or compliance data, and for the other companies out there not named Facebook?
"The majority of today’s data centers are optimized to handle tasks that need big computing power. These existing designs include traditional servers, which are always powered on and ready to deliver data. But using such server systems is not an efficient use of computing power when sitting on a lot of secondary data," said David Crume, marketing project manager at storage products business unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components.
The answer to making efficient use of secondary data, just like leftovers, is to put them in cold storage. These cold storage server systems have eight times the capacity of traditional high-IOPS storage systems, five times the energy efficiency and costs a third less. Way better than that garage freezer your grandmother has.
Toshiba has recognized the growing need for cold data archiving, particularly with 3.5” enterprise-class hard disk drives. The company is focused on making these drives energy efficient by lowering drive spin speed from 7200rpm to 5000rpm, saving an estimated 3-5 watts of operating power per drive. Considering that these new cold storage data centers could have up to hundreds of thousands of these drives, that’s a pretty hefty power saving.
"It is evident that the growth of digital data is driving big changes in the type of IT infrastructure and storage devices required to meet today’s challenges. By and large, this is another example of how the IT industry continues to dictate the need for different types of storage products," concluded Mr. Crume.
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