"Green" initiatives are en vogue and the newest "hype": if you're not wearing a "Go Green" button-- you aren't considered "cool". Green IT focuses on how to lower energy costs, et al.  One can read any number of stories that mention "social responsibility" and point to governance/regulatory pressures to build more environmentally friendly data centers. It can be argued the underlying focus to "Go Green" are company mandates to contain costs and improve management and administration by understanding how growing amounts of data is used, stored and accessed.

One approach is to install energy efficient storage hardware.  Existing storage hardware like DASD (disk), virtual tape and robotic tape libraries can be viewed as large consumers of energy and it can be argued that simply replacing these devices will achieve Green objectives. This is not done without high acquisition costs and considerable effort and may not deliver the best value for the company.  Additionally, in a down economy, is "now" the best time to acquire new hardware, given that technology plays "leapfrog" every few years and the prices will likely drop as technology improves?

A more reasonable approach that can be enacted today to address energy costs and the need to consolidate their infrastructure is to IMPROVE the utilization and OPTIMIZE Mainframe storage resources.  This software technology, SRM, has been available for decades and helps evaluate data retention policies and learn how much power every device in their data center consumes.  This simple approach can help delay the acquisition of expensive new hardware or allow for the removal of unneeded hardware. Companies that want to embrace Green initiatives can improve their data management practices to identify where data lives within a system, determine how long it should reside there and determine how retention of data (active/inactive) can impact power consumption.

In the upcoming weeks, I'll post more blogs on how mainframe storage can help with Green IT initiatives.  Have tips to save energy using storage?  Have you implemented any energy saving projects in your data center?  Let us know!  We'd be happy to help showcase your efforts and results.

Stefan Kochishan
Director, Mainframe Product Marketing
Stefan.Kochishan@ca.com