Storage Tip: Increase energy efficiency of stored data

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

One approach to increasing energy efficiency is to get more out of the storage that you already have by increasing the utilization factor over time. One way to accomplish this is to consolidate underutilized disks into fewer, but on-average, fuller disks. You can then either idle some disks that are not used and take an immediate power savings or you can wait and fill them up over time with new data without increasing power consumption. Here's what you need to know.