How much energy in kWh does it take to host 1 terabyte of data?
Including all sorts of energy costs. This is for a research I am doing on hosting. Even a ballpark figure is fine. A close to accurate number would help the cause a lot.
Good Answers (5)
Okay, I hope soem infrastructure specialist can give you some quantitative data on this... But I think I wade in on this subject..
It depends actually on several factors.. If I want to host 1 terabyte on a home pc that is hooked up to my DMZ router. then your answer is .5kWh.
Now if your talking about High Availability, fault tolerant San storage solutions with full UPS and Diesel Backup. That is altogether another thing. You'll have the cost of the San power consumption + the UPS consumption+Monitoring equipment consumption+ AirCon consumption+... etc....
So I think you need to give just a few more details....
Michael is right; you need more accessibility requirements to get meaningful answers. It costs nothing to store 1TB of data on tape.... Consider the following:
1. Speed of access: How fast do people need to get the data?
2. Nature of the data: Is the data raw text within a file, structured data in a database, or a bunch of static files to be listed/downloaded?
3. Is there any processing of the data needed to make it useful to the users? In the case of an archive of static files, no processing is needed apart from finding the needed file(s). If the data needs to be processed in order to be useful--such as loading transactions into an OLAP cube--lots of processing power may be required.
Sorry if I didn't answer your question, but hopefully it will guide you in your search for answers.
Dave
Joe L.
Parallel Entrepreneur, Founder and CEO: Scalable Informatics
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If you are looking at energy cost per TB, this is a different answer than the energy cost of 1 TB. Basically you need environmental factors to correctly account for the cost, as well as the size of the storage you want. Most colocation facilities will aggregate these costs, charge a premium atop them. Some storage cloud groups will provide more or less a fully burdened cost to you. We are working with a few, supplying storage.
If you are hosting your own, then cost per TB of the physical box should be (well) under 1000USD/TB. Cost per TB of the electrical, cooling, space is a function of the container package. We can put 96TB (84TB usable) in a 5U package. This gives 19.2 TB/U raw, at 240W/U, or roughly 12.5W/TB. About 768TB/rack, 1.5PB/2 racks. Conversely, you can buy smaller units, say 8TB total in 3U of space at roughly 2.7TB/U, at about 200W/U at about 74W/TB .
Basically packaging matters. The denser you are, the more likely you are to keep the cost per raw TB down, as you amortize the space/power/cooling costs across more storage, and less volume.
Links:
Peter G.
IT Design, Implementation & Operations.
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A general rule of thumb that I have seen used by data center managers is to tripple the power consumption of the hosted systems (storage, servers & network) to cover the environmental costs.
But again, like previous posts, that is an estimate without a basis of factual data.
I have a 60 watt micro pc with a 10 watt external 1TB drive connected to my home network for well under .1KWh. Since I live in a mild climate, no cooling is required. There is no redundancy and performance is relatively slow compared to an enterprise solution.
Here is a couple of good links on power efficency...
Links:
Like many have pointed that energy consumption can depend on the capacity of the disk and/or array ,the RPM and type of disk.
Since you have referred to 1 TB of data and i am assuming that you would be using a single SATA disk it would be 380 to 400 kWh/yr per TB.
For every 50% reduction in disk capacity you can assume the consumption to increase by 100 %.
If its a Flash drive of the same capacity you can get an energy saving of about 30-40 % over a SATA drive and a 30% increase in performance but you will need to shell out more for it :)
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It depends hugely on which array manufacturer you use as well. Our systems here at DDN can be deployed with 2.4PB in 2 racks under a single pair of controllers which gives you the most cost-efficient per-TB TCO in the industry.
Sharan K.
HPC Platform Strategist at Intel Corporation
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Since you did not specify the media type and final total figure (the energy costs go down considerably depending on the total size of the storage farm and of course the kind of animals on the farm ;-).
In a very recent performance vs energy shoot out report between and 69GB SSD and a 10K RPM SAS 300GB disk - The following figures were shared:
Cost ($)/IOP: $1.90 (disk) vs $1.94 (SSD)
Cost ($)/GB: $4.22 (disk) vs $159 (SSD)
GB/watt (IMPORTANT) : 16.3 (disk) vs 3.3 (SSD) (aha!)
IOPS/watt (interesting): 36 (disk) vs 272 (SSD) - hmmmmmmmm
So energy wise we get more in a disk, but the performance is better for an SSD.
So you see - it is not that simple or clear cut, but hopefully the data will provide food for thought (or ignite more debates!).
So 1 TB (assuming like all disk manufacturers that 1 TB = 1,000, 000,000,000 bytes) in watts will be = 61.3 watts of power (disk) and 303.3 watts of power for SSD.
Hope that helps!
Riccardo R.
Sales Consultant and Bid Management at Fujitsu Technology Solutions
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It depends............
It depends on how you stripe this data, how much you read/write on those data, how big is your machine (a singet USB disk or an IBM DS8300 Turbo).
Just give us some more infos
Thomas M.
SQL Developer at Angus Performance Advisors
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Raghuram,
You need more information to determine this. Each server used in the hosting of your data (application, data, forms, encryption, ect.) consumes some amount of electricity (Blades consume less than rackmount which in turn consume less than full towers). Code and configurations in turn can be optimized to reduce compute cycles, which in turn lowers power consumption. The Energy Star label will tell you how much power consumption the appliance averages.
