01732 759725 20 DATA STORAGE Energy cost But is this financially or environmentally sustainable? Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut ‘answer to this. Why? Because as much as the individual components of data storage have become super-efficient, the reality is that the power consumption required has increased exponentially. Storage density improvements have seen the price per gig drop by over 80% from 2009-2022, allowing businesses to scale up data storage and move on from the old days of installing rack upon rack of mechanical spinning disks, which aside from being low on capacity, gave IT Teams a constant headache when trying to maintain optimum performance. However, today’s solutions have their own financial, operational and sustainability challenges. Storing data in the cloud can be perceived as easy and relatively pain-free to manage, but migrating data between cloud services or from on-premises to the cloud is complex. Organisations dealing with high volumes of data at scale need to consider where they want to put the data and make the most appropriate and well-informed decisions about their data storage strategy up-front, rather than getting deep into a project and then deciding. Although cost in financial terms is always considered, it may not always be fully understood by businesses comparing different options for hybrid cloud solutions. And increasingly important costs, such as environmental and sustainability factors, are rarely considered by businesses at the planning stage. Do we need to store everything? Is it viable to retain our ‘store everything’ approach when data centres are estimated to be responsible for up to 3% of global electricity consumption today and are projected to touch 4% by 2030? And, if so, what is the sustainability compromise? I firmly believe that the industry will continue to innovate and develop sustainable storage technology, from hard drives to storage arrays and data services that maximise efficiency and enable every business to reduce the carbon footprint per terabyte of storage. But this is not an issue for the IT industry alone. The responsibility also sits with businesses to put in place robust data management and storage strategies. Given the scale of data growth and the need for cost, performance, security and sustainability, businesses must plan ahead. A comprehensive five-year forward view should encompass the intended strategy and structural framework, along with a well-defined plan. It should take into account the anticipated data expansion and evaluate strategic alternatives for data storage that align with the organisation’s objectives. Put simply: how and where should data be stored, and for what reason? Thinking Laterally Data storage cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the IT and wider business strategy. Organisations need to think strategically and holistically across edge, data centres, the cloud and everything in between. And at every step they should be considering the sustainability implications of their storage decisions. There will be difficult questions ahead as the demands for data change again, with generative AI and Machine Learning algorithms requiring access to petabytes of data for training models. As we embark on another massive step change in data volumes and data usage, the question is how are businesses and individuals going to respond? www.thisiscae.com The data storage industry has evolved significantly over the last 30 years, but there has been a real step change within the last decade. Not only has the amount of data, especially unstructured data, increased, but cloud-based storage has prompted companies and individuals to adopt a ‘store everything’ mindset rather than take the time to consider the true value of that information. The data we produce has grown at a phenomenal pace and it is forecast that by 2025 we will be storing 160 zettabytes a year, much of it in the cloud. The challenge for businesses – and the IT industry – is that growth in data volumes, especially unstructured data, is not gradual. Each technology innovation, in high-resolution imagery for example, can double storage demands overnight. While the millions, possibly even billions, of personal photographs and videos stored and posted to multiple social media locations are a significant contributing factor, businesses are also struggling with data growth that has fundamentally outstripped expectations. Just consider the storage implications when an NHS Trust upgrades the CT scanner software, improving the quality and hence the size of high-resolution images two, three or even four-fold in one moment. Or the rapid evolution of IoT, which is allowing businesses to generate increasingly high levels of valuable data. Or the use of AI to optimise business processes, which creates an additional data source that will need to be stored. Every aspect of stakeholder engagement and interaction now demands increasing data volumes, all of which need to be stored multiple times to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery. The evolution of storage technology means large quantities of data can be stored in smaller footprints at the edge, the data centre or in the cloud – supporting distributed data growth. With questions being asked about the environmental and financial cost of data storage, Dene Lewis, Chief Technology Officer at CAE Technology Services Ltd, looks at how data storage has evolved and how it might develop in the future Planning for the future of data storage Dene Lewis
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