Businesses last year spent approximately US$1.3 billion to make sure that spinning hard disk drives did not overheat and kept running despite being squeezed to near-capacity limits, according to IDC.
In a report released last week, IDC forecast that IT spending required to cool and power spinning disk drives will reach US$1.8 billion by the end of this year and over US$2 billion in 2009, increasing pressure on executives to create more energy efficient data centres.
IDC estimated more than 49 million hard disk drives in external storage arrays were in use by businesses around the world last year to keep up with exploding enterprise data storage demands. Since corporate customers are boosting storage capacity by an aggregate rate of 50 per cent a year, the impact of making sure enough power is available to run and cool disk drives is forcing a dramatic increases in energy costs for IT managers, said Dave Reinsel, group vice-president for Storage and Semiconductors at IDC.
Although technologies like solid-state storage devices can help IT managers cut back on the use of power-hungry spinning disk drives, Reinsel cautioned that any benefits could be offset by product immaturity or unreliability.
Reinsel said IT managers in 2007 dedicated an average of nearly 13 watts of energy to every disk drive in their data centers. He estimated the cost of powering the systems at 7 cents per kilowatt per hour, he added.
Variables used by IDC to calculate its external findings on storage power and cooling include: hard disk drive spin speeds, device form-factor, interface, capacity and workloads of the drives. The firm also made “allowances” for power inefficiencies, fans, power supplies, and controllers for its research.