Storage energy costs will plateau in 2014, says IDC

Expected to start rising after that as demand for more capacity overhauls latest efficiency savings

Efficiency gains will be overtaken by demand

The energy required to power and cool large-scale data storage farms should plateau in the next few years as more efficient technologies are deployed, according to industry soothsayers at IDC.

However, the respite will be temporary and demand for ever more capacity will drive up consumption after 2014, the analyst predicts.

IDC’s latest report on storage technologies, A Plateau in Sight for the Rising Costs to Power and Cool the World's External Storage? foresees that costs to power and cool enterprise storage are likely to level off somewhere around 2013-2014.

This will be caused by migration to 2.5in energy efficient hard drives; greater utilisation of existing storage capacity; adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs); and deployment of various storage efficiency technologies, such as data de-duplication, compression, and thin provisioning.

A shift to slower-spinning SATA drives, which have twice the capacity of traditional high performance enterprise drives will also help.

Combined, these technologies will slow the growth in enterprise storage power and cooling costs, and the associated carbon footprint, over the next several years, says the report. But it will not last.

"While the direction of these efforts is good, and the inflection point towards lower costs is notable, it is not likely the trend will be sustainable, " said David Reinsel, group vice president for storage systems at IDC. "Once the migration to cost-efficient hardware and strategies is complete, the steady expansion in capacity will result in renewed growth in energy costs."

Enterprise storage remained a key area of investment for IT heads throughout the economic downturn, driven by continuous pressure to store ever more data, IDC’s report shows. Annual capacity shipments within external enterprise storage increased 38 per cent year on year in 2009. But with flat or diminished IT budgets, firms also turned to storage efficiency technologies.

While these technologies bring about one-time efficiency gains within the datacentre, deploying systems that consume less power provide perpetual energy savings, the report points out.