The term global warming can be very polarizing in a conversation and both sides of the argument have mountains of material that support or discredit the overall situation. The most devout believers in global warming point to the average temperature increases in the Earths atmosphere over the last 100+ years. They maintain the rise is primarily caused by increased greenhouse gases from humans burning fossil fuels and deforestation.
The opposition generally agrees with the measured increase in temperature over that time, but claims that increase is part of a natural cycle of the planet and not something humans can significantly impact one way or another. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that 90% of worlds marketed energy consumption is from non-renewable energy sources like fossil fuels. Our internet-driven lives run through datacenters that are well-known to consume large quantities of power. No matter which side of the global warming argument you support, most people agree that wasting power is not a good long-term position. Therefore, if the power consumed by datacenters can be reduced, especially as we live in an increasingly digitized world, this would benefit all mankind.
When we look at the most power-hungry components of a datacenter, we find mainly server and storage systems. However, people sometimes forget that those systems require cooling to counteract the heat generated. But the cooling itself consumes even more energy. So anything that can store data more efficiently and quickly will reduce both the initial energy consumption and the energy to cool those systems. As datacenters demand faster data storage, they are shifting to solid state drives (SSDs). SSDs generally provide higher performance per watt of power consumed over hard disk drives, but there is still more that can be done.
Reducing data to help turn down the heat
The good news is that there’s a way to reduce the amount of data that reaches the flash memory of the SSD. The unique DuraWrite technology found in all LSI SandForce flash controllers reduces the amount of data written to the flash memory to cut the time it takes to complete the writes and therefore reduce power consumption, below levels of other SSD technologies. That, in turn, reduces the cooling needed to further reduce overall power consumption. Now this data reduction is loss-less, meaning 100% of what is saved is returned to the host, unlike MPEG, JPEG, and MP3 files, which tolerate some amount of data loss to reduce file sizes.
Today you can find many datacenters already using SandForce Driven SSDs and LSI Nytro application acceleration products (which use DuraWrite technology as well). When we start to see datacenters deploying these flash storage products by the millions, you will certainly be able to measure the reduction in power consumed by datacenters. Unfortunately, LSI will not be able to claim it stopped global warming, but at least we, and our customers, can say we did something to help defer the end result.