How Green is Green?

Andrew Martin

A few months ago I was presenting at a conference in Kolkata aimed at stimulating adoption of IT in West Bengal. One of the other presenters at the event was the trade minister for the region and I was fascinated as he outlined the challenges and aspirations he saw ahead in West Bengal. However I was also struck by a comment he made about green computing. He mentioned that it was important to repurpose old IT equipment and recycle old computers from companies into the community.

I have no doubt that his intention is a good one. Taking computers discarded by businesses and placing them into the hands of community centres and schools is something that will deliver enormous benefit to large parts of the population that could not even begin to think about buying their own computers. However, is this green computing as the minister described?

The answer is “I don’t know” and the truth is, when you look into the issue of energy saving it is enormously complex.

On the surface, if you extend the life of a PC and keep it in use after the original owner has discarded it, that would seem to be a green practice, as manufacturing requirements for new PCs will be reduced. However, to really assess whether an IT-related policy is truly green, so much more needs to be considered than simply extending the life of a piece of equipment.

• How much energy was consumed in the manufacturing process?
• How much energy was consumed in the manufacturing of the components?
• What is the ongoing energy consumption over time? (Older equipment typically consumes more energy just to run.)
• How much energy will be consumed in the safe disposal of the product?

In short, to really understand if we are achieving green computing we need to consider the energy consumption over the entire lifetime of the product from manufacturing through to the final disposal process. For most of us this is an impossible task. It requires expert consultancy, a long-term vision with senior level commitment to that vision. Large, multi-national companies are taking this approach, but for the rest of us necessity demands that we take a more pragmatic approach.

The view that I have heard from many IT managers and directors is something akin to, “I believe in looking for efficiencies and cost savings and often if I can achieve these, the result is less power consumption and fewer wasted resources. If I can drive efficiency and save money, the spin off is that most likely I am being more green.”

On balance, I subscribe to this view. Efficiency is generally a good thing. When we utilise just enough resources to deliver the functionality that we need, then waste is trimmed, budgets are saved and over-consumption is eliminated.

When it comes to data protection, the practice is intrinsically “non-green.” Data protection involves creating duplicate copies of existing data. By it’s nature this process creates “waste” as it requires more storage hardware, dedicated storage networks, redundant systems, increased power consumption, and the list goes on.

However, all vendors in the data protection space are trying to drive efficiency, and in doing so, are finding ways to reduce excess resource utilisation. Examples of technology that aid the green cause, even if the reason for being is nothing to do with green issues, include: 

• Tape – Tape is offline media. It does not consume power when stored in a vault. Perhaps it is the greenest of all media?
• Data depulication – Compressing 30TB of data onto 5TB of disk is truly efficient. Less hardware required and reduced ongoing power consumption.
• MAID – Intelligently powering down disks that are not in use saves money on datacenter cooling and on powering the disks themselves.
• Virtualisation – converting physical servers or storage into virtual enables you to consume more resource from every piece of hardware you own.
• Cloud-based backup – Sharing a single backup infrastructure between numerous companies and users.
• Software enhancement – Things like “incremental forever” eliminate full backups, which in turn reduces media consumption.

Most of us believe the green cause in IT is a good one. Actually doing something about it can be complex and difficult. However, keeping up with the data protection technology curve is in itself a way to support a green agenda and save costs. When it comes to repurposing old PC’s in Kolkata, is that green? Possibly not. However, is it wrong? Well, that’s a moral dilemma and whole different debate!

A Quick Look at Cloud Computing

Scott Wells

Ever since the early 1990s the information superhighway has helped collaboration among agencies and organizations evolve. Without this communication and data sharing, it would be nearly impossible to meet all the regulations, laws and standards set into place today. There are now countless services and applications that act as road signs along the superhighway, helping guide us toward our end result. As these services become more abundant, cloud computing has become a hot buzz word to describe the range of possibilities at our fingertips.     

The metaphor of the cloud to represent Internet-as-a-service has different meaning to various analysts and technology groups. Some narrowly define cloud computing as virtual services available over the Internet. Others consider anything outside the firewall as “in the cloud.” Regardless of the scope of the definition, cloud computing is any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that helps IT meet increasing needs without investing in new infrastructure, software or hardware.     

The following are several of the technologies that are encompassed by cloud computing:     

• Software as a service (SaaS): Offers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers (Salesforce.com)
• Utility computing: Offers storage and virtual servers that IT can access on demand (Amazon.com)
• Web services: Helps developers create functionality over the Internet, rather than delivering full-blown applications (GoogleMaps)
• Platform as a service: Offers development environments as a service. Developers build applications that run on the providers infrastructure (Google App Engine)
• Managed service providers (MSP): An IT application, rather than an end user application (anti-spam service)

The storage industry is not immune to the changes cloud computing is ushering in. Cloud storage has the potential to lower costs, reduce capital investments and provide increased scalability as it becomes another viable tier of online storage. These benefits hold great appeal to both large and small enterprises as the economic downturn, shrinking IT budgets and reduced staffing put pressure on tech departments to cut costs while also storing and protecting growing mountains of data. However, storage in the cloud, or storage as a service, has its own set of potential issues around performance. Specifically, for applications that require a large amount of data that needs to be accessed instantly, it might still be faster to use physical storage located within the traditional IT data center.     

However, with such an impressive resume of capabilities, it is hard to understand why everyone wouldn’t jump onto the cloud computing bandwagon. There are a couple reasons that immediately stand out. When you consider the amount of control a company forfeits by moving data and operations to the cloud, the risks become clear. Legal documents, intellectual property and other crucial company data are not easily transitioned into applications that are not located directly on a company’s server due to the risk of theft or accidental misappropriation. Also adding to the mix is the risk of down time. If the Internet goes down, a company’s employees are left without the tools they need to continue daily operations.     

Despite these concerns, it is easy to envision a future that has most daily operations taking place in the cloud. Gartner has predicted cloud computing will grow from $46 billion a year to $150 billion by 2013. Corporate IT departments are increasingly drawn in to the benefits and time-saving, budget-reducing aspects that are undeniable. Also, as technology evolves, many of the above concerns are diminished. For instance, many Web applications are now developed with an offline component that enables users to continue working when there is an Internet outage. Little by little, the concerns of cloud computing and the hiccups involved with many of its components are replaced by the benefits.     

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Sun, IBM and other leading technology vendors already offer cloud service capabilities. Amazon invited students, educators and researchers to apply for grants that would give them free access to the company’s hosted computing services. At Microsoft’s Management Summit 2009, the company’s main focus was around the virtualized environments of tomorrow’s datacenters and how mobile devices will connect to the cloud.     

Here at BakBone, we are looking at ways to incorporate our technologies into these new cloud architectures. One way we can leverage the cloud is by ensuring our products are cloud friendly so customers can use the cloud as just another choice of backup media or online disk storage with immediate off-site flexibility. As we all fly down the information highway, looking to follow the road signs, it is encouraging to see the new possibilities. However, it is also important to continually check these technologies for the security and reliability necessary to sustain the trip. If cloud computing delivers what many are projecting and finds solutions to security and privacy issues, it could very well be the way of the future.

What to Consider When Evaluating Cloud-Based Backup

Andrew Martin

We are seeing a lot of “buzz” around cloud and backup to the cloud. Vendors, analysts and journalists are discussing it. BakBone is finding that the topic is becoming more common place in everyday discussions about data protection.

Issues to consider when thinking about moving data protection out to the cloud:

1 – Complexity does not go away. Protecting an application such as messaging or databases is no less complex simply because the data is being sent out to the cloud. To ensure you get the protection and recovery SLAs your business needs, you still need to work with companies that understand the intricacies of application data protection. In most cases, providers of cloud-based storage capacity will not have the skills or experience in this area. For business data protection, working with a traditional expert in this field that has links to a cloud provider will make most sense.

2 – Who is the provider of the cloud-based infrastructure? This is a key part of your decision. Do they have resources that are secure enough for your business critical data? What data protection strategy do they have in place in their infrastructure? Is the operation too big to respond to individual issues if and when things go wrong? Large corporate providers such as Amazon storage may be suitable, but if your data is highly secure then you must seriously consider whether these providers will give the level of security you require.

3 – Protection is one thing, but recoverability is also vital. Testing a service to establish exactly how quickly data can be recovered in the event of data loss on your primary systems is vital. Not all providers will be the same in this respect and it is important that this is taken into consideration.

4 – How much control do you want to turn over to the cloud based provider? Do you want to outsource the entire data protection function to them or do you simply want a cloud-based repository where you can send your data to? If it is the latter, not much changes other than you reduce backup hardware requirements on your production site. If it is the former then the level of investigation into the provider, their skills and experience becomes critical.