Green Information Technology Strategic Plan - Departmental ...

CO2 in tons fig. 13
8.5 Data Center Consolidation
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
Reduction in CO 2 Emissions from Data Center Facilities Consolidation
Supporting Environmentally Responsible Technology at USDA
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Procuring storage products according to a tiered storage
framework saves money because each tier after the first costs
around 20% less than the storage tier above it. This can further
assist in consolidation efforts because more information will
be pulled out of high-cost storage equipment and placed in
appropriate lower level storage, which will in turn lead to the
retiring of aging storage hardware that is no longer needed.
Techniques and technology for thin provisioning and storage
virtualization should also be used. These approaches assist
in eliminating unused storage due to over-allocation. Thin
provisioning solves the issue of over allocating storage to new
applications that then lead to unused disk space. Through
thin provisioning, “administrators can create ‘flexible’
volumes that appear to the application to be a certain size,
Year
but are in reality much smaller physically. Data volumes
can be resized quickly and dynamically as application
requirements change.” 48 Deploying storage virtualization
technology in enterprise data centers will enable USDA
to pool storage resources and easily scale storage up as
needed. The virtualization software acts as the management
platform and performs all storage functions as the third
party oversight. The ability to allocate storage resources ondemand,
integrate storage products from various vendors,
configure for high availability, and reduce the total cost of
ownership are among the benefits that storage virtualization
provides. USDA’s use of these storage technologies will create
savings in data center power and cooling requirements, thus
increasing energy efficiency.
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