New Climate Change Agreements (CCAs) forces UK data centres back to the consumption drawing board:

Where do you start? Cutting the mass overhead of needless spinning disk in your data centre for a start.

Last week the Government announced that UK based data centres can now enter into Climate Change Agreements (CCAs) which, when met, entitles them to significant tax breaks, bringing the UK in line with most advanced EU countries. Most commentators view the move as long overdue - but begrudgingly admit it secures UKs place at the table when it comes to data centre expansion and growth.

Now the heat is on to meet the CCAs with reductions of up to 30% being expected in IT and non-IT carbon infrastructure savings. Everything is up for consideration. One area where immediate productivity gains can be experienced with relatively low overhead is reducing the amount of physical storage within the data centre.  For many years, at DataCore, we have been discussing how storage systems spin disks 100% of the time, even if they are accessed only 15% of the time. Today, the era of software defined storage is upon us, with the software defined layer provided by SANsymphony-V seamlessly allocating data away from energy intensive spinning disks and onto a virtual storage layer that is allocated as a tiered shared resource. To minimize consumption, the software thinly provisions capacity from the virtual storage pool to hosts, only as needed, so previously pre-allocated disk space is freed up and disks no long whizz round needlessly. And there's management tools included that prove the transition and help qualify for the CCA.


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