Debate on Compression could reduce Data Center Energy

I just wanted to share a nice topic about how the compression technology can reduce Data Center Energy use by 95% and on the other hand giving the comment that how it could go well on the fact.

Written by Peg Fong on:

the concept to apply compression to primary data, such as application servers, email or databases and that will radically reduce data center energy usage. Storwize Inc., a San Jose, CA tech company, has a process to reduce data center energy usage up to 95 per cent. This means on a 100 TB database, Storwize can compress that to less than 10 TB of physical disk.

Real-time data compression reduces the amount of data written to storage devices and thus reduces CPU, disk, memory and network utilization on the storage system. It can do this through its patent-pending algorithms that allow write and read operations from any location within the file while avoiding the need to decompress the whole file.

Compressed data doesn't just save energy use, it reduces the real estate required to house the data centres, the energy needed to cool down the space and all the other trappings of physical space that adds up to a heavier footprint on the environment.

Commented by Sam Winter:

"Compression = more CPU time = more electricity. Duh"

It's much more complicated than that. Obviously, data compression requires a net increase in CPU power draw, but you are gaining back all the power required for many HDDs and raid controllers that you would have replaced as the data would be compressed. In that case, it would be fairly straightforward to figure out the NET reduction in total energy expended after gathering all the data on processor power usage, HDD power usage, how many units of storage could be removed, etc.

Now, using normal system CPUs to calculate the compression/decompression algorithms is very inefficient. A much better idea would be to add low-power, custom designed chips that implement the compression/decompression algorithms in hardware to the systems. This could be done DIRECTLY within PCIexpress RAID disk controllers that connect the servers to the harddrives. They would be doing real-time compression and decompression every-time a file is read or written, and at much lower power and much higher efficiency than the primary system CPU.
If you coupled this idea with smarter compression algorithms like those mentioned in the article that can access pieces of files without decompressing the entire file, this type of system could potentially create incredible gains in data-center power efficiency while keeping the same data capacity and use levels. At the same time, it could save a lot of money and service more users than a traditional solution.

reference from ecogeek.