Seagate commissioned a survey and report based upon that survey on the role that digital storage can play in creating more sustainable and efficient data centers. This is particularly important as data centers scale up and new data centers are built to support AI-related businesses.
The survey gathered responses from 330 data center professionals across 11 markets: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, North America, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
The report indicates that energy usage is now a top concern for 53.5% of business leaders. The press release quotes Goldman Sachs Research as forecasting that global power demand for data centers will increase by as much as 165% by 2030, compared with 2023.
Other key findings are:
- 94.5% of respondents reported increasing data storage needs, with 97% anticipating AI’s growth to further impact storage demand.
- Nearly 95% of respondents are concerned about environmental impact, but only 3.3% prioritize this in their purchasing decisions.
- Top barriers to driving sustainability at data centers are high energy consumption (53.5%), raw material requirements (49.5%), physical space constraints (45.5%), infrastructure costs (28.5%), and acquisition costs (27%)
- 92.2% acknowledge the importance of extending the life cycle of storage equipment, but only 15.5% consider it a top purchasing factor.
The full report goes into depth on how reducing the total cost of ownership and achieving sustainability goals can be achieved together as indicated in the figure below.
By using less power to store data, storage tiering with less frequently accesses data in less expensive and lower power storage technology, storage device life cycle extension and efficient space use in data centers costs can be controlled while using less energy and generating less greenhouse gasses
Note that the carbon contribution for storage in data centers includes both the embedded carbon in manufacturing, shipping and assembling storage systems as well as the ongoing carbon generated by power generation to use the storage devices in storage systems. The figure below, from the report, compares Seagate’s estimates of the embedded carbon in SSDs versus HDDs and LTO tape.
SSDs and HDDs show a significant difference in the embodied carbon since the semiconductor manufacturing processes used to make the NAND flash die in SSDs take a lot of energy and resources, while HDDs require much less energy and carbon generating resources to manufacture.
The table above indicates that the expected embodied carbon per TB per year for SSDs is close to 200 times greater than for HDDs. The table shows LTO tape as also much lower than SSDs but a bit more than HDDs. However, LTO tape is a removable storage media typically used in a library system rather than a complete storage device such as SSDs and HDDs, so I am not sure such a comparison to LTO tape is useful.
The report also contains a table on estimated operating power for SSDs, HDDs and LTO tape and an estimated power efficiency in W/TB, shown below.
This table indicates that SSDs for data centers use over 50% more operating power per TB of storage capacity. The LTO tape in the table seems to indicate that it uses more power, but the table is showing the power consumed while writing and reading the tape. With magnetic tape in a tape library the tapes spend most of their time sitting idle in the library, so the actual average power efficiency of the magnetic tape would be much less.
Seagate’s commissioned survey and report indicates that there are ways that data centers can manage more stored data while reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by careful choices of digital storage in a storage hierarchy.
