March 30, 2011 – At least weekly, we read a new article about the volume of data being created around the world. The increase of metadata has dramatically grown, and the vehicles delivering it continue to multiply. To put numbers to the adjectives, Wal-Mart now handles more than one million customer transactions every hour and Facebook is reportedly home to some 40 billion photos.
This interesting topic was found on The Times of India in their article, “Expensive datacenters will drive companies to the cloud.”
It should be no surprise that the efficiency of storage systems has become an issue. There are several initiatives aimed at trying to reduce power consumption in storage systems, and also improve the efficiency of storage systems in virtualized data centers. Energy efficiency is something you typically address in your home, along with recycling and composting. Whoever thought when creating the data, how much literal energy it would take to maintain it? Storage approaches have changed to reduce power consumption, whether that data is in the clouds or on your own platform. More changes will be needed.
Melody K. Smith
