You and I are part of a growing problem. With our mobile phones, social musings and cloud computing, we each consume and produce an enormous quantity of data every day. And the companies that store our data – along with the data of every other individual and business in the world – are investing billions of dollars in building and maintaining data centers. But, the amount of data is growing exponentially faster than traditional data storage approaches can manage.
How big of a problem is this? The annual IDC study of the digital universe estimates that the amount of data in the world will double every two years by 2020, reaching more than 5200GB per person on the planet. Today, there are more than 500,000 data centers worldwide, and with a year over year footprint growth of nearly 10%, the number of data centers will double every seven years. That’s a lot of new buildings, which impacts our environment in a big way. Even more alarmingly, each of those data centers consumes a shocking amount of energy:
If data center power consumption continued on the current path, data centers will consume 7% of total US electricity in 2016 and by 2037, 56% of total US electricity will be used to power its data centers. There has to be a better way.
Companies have to make smarter choices about data storage. Choices that include not only the traditional decision criteria of performance, reliability and cost, but also the key metric of sustainability.
At Skyera, enabling a sustainable, smart data center that consumes less energy is part of the reason why we continue to push the boundaries of storage innovation. For example, Skyera’s solution consumes 97% less power than many of today’s storage products. Beyond this, our solution can pack a half petabyte of native capacity in a slim and sleek 1U system. So, instead of building new data centers to accommodate for power hungry, space-consuming storage systems, why not refresh and refit existing whitespaces to make them more energy efficient and pack more density into every square foot? With our low power, high performance approach, companies can enjoy all-flash storage solutions that not only minimize physical footprint and power consumption, but nearly obliterate those impacts entirely.
Today’s smart phones that fit in your pocket have more storage than most very large computers had a decade ago. Looking at the comparison above, we are doing more than what smartphones did in terms of disruption, but this time for storage and data centers. All of this at prices in line with the prices of the old power burning, environmentally polluting HDDs that are causing all these negative environmental impacts and will continue to do so if we don’t change the game.
For us, innovation in data storage means a vision of the future where new data centers are not needed and furthermore the existing ones are bulldozed in favor of green spaces, where exabytes and zetabytes of data live in ever-smaller stacks of hardware and require less energy than it takes to power your mobile phone. Stop being part of the problem. Join our revolution!
