When corporation’s find themselves keeping more data for longer, this presents more challenges than anticipated. Power into the datacenter is a finite resource and an increasing concern, both in terms of cost control and the battle for who gets the limited power available? Not least of the problems of course is floorspace. We find ourselves with many more things to consider when customers decide to house 50% more data online and yet have not provisioned the same increase capability in floorspace and power coming into the building for the new environment, not forgetting the power required to cool this extra kit.

Our observations at SGI show it’s becoming fairly regular practice to divide the available power evenly by the number of racks that fit the floorspace. This often leaves racks 30-50% under-utilised and the first thing to disappear is the available floorspace. The thought process shifts from actual floorspace to KwH per TB or watts per core for compute racks.

There is little option now but to consider every aspect of each customer’s specific growth plans so we make best use of these resources while at the same time offering a viable solution to the corporate growth plans where sacrificing service may compromise the growth and competitive edge our customers demand.

We’ll see how some of our customers were able to provide an increased service level and storage growth while reducing the power and floorspace demands compared with their current disk subsystem technologies. Something that enhanced their service rather than force compromise. A disk technology that housed inactive data online in a massively dense footprint, using less power… this describes the MAID solution being used worldwide at SGI’s customers.