This is what you've all been waiting for: The Planet Filestore Final Report.

Introduction

The aim of this project is to use storage more effectively by implementing a low energy dynamic file storage management system which will manage the migration of unstructured data based on required availability level.

Environmental

It has been estimated that ICT accounts for approximately 2% of total carbon emissions and that UK Higher and Further Education colleges pay approximately £116 million in annual energy bills for their ICT infrastructures. The need to control emissions and, as a consequence, reduce energy costs, has never been greater.

Initiatives involving the client and data centre environment have been widely documented elsewhere but here we will focus on unstructured data storage. Unstructured data does not have a strict data model. Typically, such data is held in email, html documents or word processor documents.

Historical

In the past the majority of storage was attached to servers where, in some cases, only a proportion of that storage was used. Changes in server energy consumption have occurred largely due to the development of server technology which has enabled the delivery of more processing power without a consequential increase in energy consumption. However in the storage area, there has been an increased business requirement to protect data from loss using replication and to store more data for business operations or to meet compliance regulations. If these changes in requirements for storage are not dealt with in an energy-efficient manner, the power consumption savings made as a consequence of server consolidation may become offset or even cancelled out by the increased energy demands for larger amounts of storage. This has led to innovations in both the server and storage areas as consideration of both these areas is necessary to decrease energy consumption within the IT environment.

At the JISC Innovation Forum we came up with this new summary of our project. We think it's clearer, briefer and makes more sense.[Read More]

We now have all our servers built. Hurrah.

We're hoping to hold a Green ICT event in Cardiff on the 7th September - it's likely to be called something like "Greening DataCentres and Storage" - keep your diaries free. It'll be great.

Hugh has been invited to speak on Green ICT at the Australian National Higher Education Summit - he expects to talk about Planet Filestore.

We're really looking forward to the JISC Innovation Forum in July.

Paul is currently at the Novell TTP conference - where he will be talking about Planet Filestore. So far the conference has been great. (I'm currently listening to an excellent session by David Condrey who is providing some of the software we use for the project - Paul).

People love our project - and we have fun playing ball.[Read More]

We do some sums, talk to some folks and boxes start to arrive.[Read More]

We have very busy getting the project off the ground. Find out what we've been up to. [Read More]

Aims and objectives

The aim of this project is to use storage more effectively by implementing a low energy dynamic file storage management system which will manage the migration of unstructured data based on required availability level. We intend to monitor storage capacity to reduce energy requirements, to produce a set of measurements that demonstrates the energy savings to be made versus migration policy and to undertake an economic assessment of the system. We will also disseminate project outcomes effectively and to publicise the benefits to the community.

Project methodology 

 We will conduct a review of the storage management solutions available and the most energy-efficient, cost-effective storage. Following this, we will procure suitable software and hardware in order to build a demonstrator system. This demonstrator system will be tested against duplicate data from current university systems and also rolled out to a reference user group. The energy and economic costs and benefits will be estimated and compared along with any impact on users.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• An analysis and comparison of data migration technology;
• A demonstrator system;
• A set of experimental results along with the associated migration policies;
• Analysis of experimental results;
• Reports and other information allowing the community to benefit from this work.

Technology / Standards used

• Hierarchical Storage Management
• Dynamic Storage Technology
• Clustering
  
• Storage Area Network
• Power consumption monitoring