Energy costs represent the second largest line item associated with datacentre operations today, consuming more than 10% of a typical enterprise's IT budget. Experts predict that the number will rise quickly in just a few years. Joel Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager, Common Storage Platform Operations, EMC Corporation shares with Biztech2.0 his views on the need for energy efficient storage solutions for datacentres.

What is the need for energy efficient storage solutions in the current datacentre environment?

The truth is that the rising energy prices have hit the datacentre market hard. While a typical server 10 years ago consumed 100W of power, the average server today consumes four times as much. Servers would use about 30% of their peak electricity consumption while sitting idle, which is often more than 80% of the time. And to make things even worse, the density of servers per square foot has doubled at the same time from 7 servers per rack to 14 servers per rack.

According to IDC, the overall power density of the datacentre is increasing by 15% per year. All the electricity consumed by servers is transformed into heat, so to prevent datacentres from turning into hot houses, about 125% more electricity is consumed by the cooling equipment.

As energy costs continue to rise and power grid capacity is pushed to the brink, energy provisioning and consumption are emerging as critical concerns for today's CIOs, IT administrators and facility managers.

Mention some of the energy-efficiency initiatives undertaken by EMC.

EMC enables energy efficiency with scalable-tiered storage solutions, advanced software and tools, and innovative new services.

Our first offering is EMC Energy Efficiency Services, which are a team of consultants that can help customers make your datacentre as power efficient as possible. Our experts leverage comprehensive methodologies to evaluate power consumption within their current infrastructure and develop effective strategies for maximum power savings and future expansion.

The EMC Power Calculator for EMC Symmetrix DMX-3, CLARiiON CX3 and Celerra networked storage systems is a unique, EMC-developed tool designed to estimate actual energy consumption and cooling requirements based on customer-tailored configuration specifications and workload forecasts.

EMC storage platforms are also designed to consume less energy per terabyte than alternative solutions.

What is EMC doing towards virtualisation?

EMC offers a number of energy-saving software capabilities, from active archiving to virtualisation. Virtualisation optimises and consolidates servers, reduces IT costs, and enables lower energy consumption in your datacentres.

Powerful EMC virtualisation solutions, such as VMware, can help you consolidate servers by a 20:1 ratio, increasing capacity utilisation and eliminating unnecessary infrastructure.

One of the mainstay use cases of virtualisation server consolidation and containment allows customers to squeeze multiple workloads on the same server. We estimate conservatively that for every workload moved from a physical to virtual environment, customers can save about $290 in electricity costs, and about $360 a year in cooling costs. The more important thing is that these savings accrue year after year.

Data and file mobility softwares such as EMC EmailXtender, DatabaseXtender, and DiskXtender lets you move data seamlessly to the right level of storage, enabling efficient tiered storage that saves power.

EMC plans to focus on SMEs in the coming year; what are your top priorities?

We do not use the term- SME, but emerging businesses; as we see increasing potential in this particular industry segment. EMC estimates that the information management and storage needs of SMEs are growing at more than 150% annually.

At EMC we like to ‘Think global, but Act local’. The way that translates into our SME market strategy is that we are doing different things in India than we are doing in the US. The difference in strategy has got to do with the differences in average size of organisations, the difference in our partner and channel readiness, the difference in our brand recognition and the different needs that Indian customers in the SMB space have. In India our focus is to grow the market and to do that we will focus on expanding geographical reach, building and investing in our partners, and having the right sized and right priced products for this market. We will be coming out with tailor-made products for the SME segment in India by next year.

You are also targeting the consumer community; what’s in store for them?

Yes, EMC is focused on helping customers across segments store, protect, optimise and leverage their information. We would also be targeting the consumer segment going forward. However, we can’t share the details at this point of time.