EDITOR’ S QUESTION
The exponential growth of data has led to significant business challenges and environmental concerns for organisations to address. As data fuels the Fourth Industrial Revolution, managing its environmental impact becomes crucial. Data sprawl and redundancy increase storage requirements, consuming vast amounts of resources and energy. Poor data management further exacerbates this issue, with up to 80 – 90 % of backedup data deemed redundant. labour requirements, saves companies money in the near term, and minimises additional spending and risk in the longer term.
Organisations need to consider tools that reduce data redundancy and streamline storage capacity utilisation, as well as target solutions offering measurable cost efficiencies. It is also essential to evaluate IT infrastructure and labour spending reductions, as well as associated data centre energy demand reductions.
The strategy of keeping everything forever is not feasible and wastes energy and resources, and the typical approach of having many copies of redundant data stored in siloes all over the enterprise exacerbates this challenge.
The way data is stored also contributes to the problem. While storing data on disk improves data availability and protection, for meeting service level agreements, compliance regulations, backup and recovery processes, business continuance and disaster recovery plans, storage systems consume a significant portion of data centre space and power.
Electricity costs alone have increased 20 % or more over the last few years and storage is estimated to command 35 %-40% or more of data centre power. Data management software point products, just like hardware point products, exacerbate enterprise inefficiency. Software point products necessitate additional server requirements, additional disk and, or tape storage hardware, more power and additional IT workforce requirements.
Best-practice enterprise data management – using the right enterprise data management software – improves storage utilisation, drives efficiency into the data centre, and produces measurable results. Only when this has been addressed will green energy solutions like using renewables to power data centres become viable options, as consumption must first be optimised before any alternative power options can be effective.
By reducing data centre energy consumption and associated costs through intelligent technology that maximises existing IT investments and minimises raw storage, organisations can find a better way to manage data while also reducing power, cooling, and space requirements within the data centre. p
Effective enterprise data management enables efficiency by addressing multiple data needs with a unified approach.
We need to look at data management practices through a lens of environmental awareness. This means that to adopt greener practices and reduce the carbon footprint associated with data, we need to be smarter about storing and managing information. Applying energy efficiency principles to enterprise data management reduces equipment and associated
GRAHAM BROWN, COUNTRY MANAGER SA AND SADC, COMMVAULT
www. intelligentcio. com INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA 29