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The Dirty Side of Green

Enterprise SSDs: Are You Asking Too Much From Client Drives?
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#3) The Dirty Side of GreenToday, data centers are increasingly power-constrained. Already, they consume 3% of America’s power budget, and that trend is still rising as computing demands rise. It’s not uncommon for data centers to max out the amount of power their infrastructure can support, and sometimes power companies must deny data center applications to expand because their grid has no more juice left to give. Organizations must do more with less energy.

Some enterprise-oriented storage tests, such as the SPC-1E, incorporate energy consumption into a total analysis of drive performance.Some enterprise-oriented storage tests, such as the SPC-1E, incorporate energy consumption into a total analysis of drive performance.

We’ve already discussed drive endurance, duty cycles, and the ability to perform consistently over time. Cumulatively, these factors contribute to the total amount of work a drive can do over its always-on lifetime. This results in a major ramification.

Imagine you just received a huge pile of gravel in your driveway that has to be shoveled and wheel-barrowed into your back yard. You’ve been working out, and you think you’ll be fine. You shovel fast, then slow down...then shovel fast, then slow down. If you don’t do something, you’re going to have a coronary, so you call over two friends who are more or less in your same shape. All three of you require five glasses of water per hour to keep working. Meanwhile, the guy down the street got the same gravel shipment in his driveway. He’s six feet or rippling, biomechanical awesomeness, and he doesn’t need friends. He may not work quite as fast as the three of you, and he guzzles down nine glasses of water per hour, but he gets the job done on his own.



After seven hours, your team is done, and you’ve consumed (3 x 5 x 7 =) 105 glasses of water. Superman down the street finishes in nine hours, and he’s only consumed (1 x 9 x 9 =) 81 glasses of water. On your own, you consume fewer resources, but your neighbor is enterprise-class. That guy doesn’t brag about being water-friendly, but the fact is that he’s got you beat by gallons over the long-term.

Obviously, this explains how a higher-power enterprise drive is actually greener than a supposedly “green” client drive. But there’s more. What if you and your neighbor both get another load of gravel delivered tomorrow? Who’s going to be better able to handle that work the next day, and the next, and the next? All three people on your team will be sitting in ice baths and need to be replaced before your beefcake rival needs a break, and this plays back into our value discussion. Enterprise-class drives improve TCO not only because they can do the work of three client drives but also because they require less servicing by IT and thus incur fewer support costs.