Storage Sustainability Requires an Active Archive

Sustainability has risen sharply in importance over the last couple of years. Countries have set dates for when they will achieve net-zero carbon emissions. Cities are engaged in electrification. Regions are rolling out renewable energy resources to replace traditional power generation equipment.

Key sustainability areas in IT include energy consumption, minimizing e-waste, and achieving supply chain efficiency. C-level executives have gotten the message. Many are committing to stricter environmental targets. According to Gartner, 70% of CEOs plan to invest in sustainable products and make existing products more sustainable. What is likely to happen, therefore, is that the legal and compliance measures currently impacting data centers will be broadened to embrace carbon reduction policies.

Energy Hogs
When policymakers at a national and international level crunch the carbon footprint numbers, they typically zero in on where they perceive the biggest potential gains. Hence, transportation, power generation, oil and gas, and data center power usage are very much in the spotlight. It is well known that data centers consume a huge chunk of global energy – some say as much as 3%. That figure doesn’t take into account all the onsite IT environments that exist outside of actual data centers.

IT needs to find a way to make real progress on the energy consumption front. And that’s where LTO-9 and active archives come into play. According to research from Fujifilm, LTO-9 tape produces 97% less CO₂ than hard disk drives (HDD) during its lifecycle.

How? The Global DataSphere report by International Data Corp. (IDC) states that if organizations worldwide migrate cold data to modern tape storage, the impact could be enormous. IDC estimates that 62% of the 8.3 zettabytes of data stored in 2021 resided on HDDs. By migrating just 60% of that data to tape, CO₂ emissions could be reduced by 72 million tons. Energy consumption would be slashed by 57%. That’s only 60% of cold or frozen data. Imagine the environmental impact of putting all such data on tape,

Making Tape Even More Sustainable
Tape is already a sustainability winner. But we can make it even more so by:

• Using green or renewable energy resources for LTO tape manufacturing and operations. Powering facilities with solar or wind power is a smart strategy.
• Making liberal use of data compression or deduplication techniques to reduce the amount of LTO needed for storage.
• Implementing proper storage and maintenance practices to extend the life and performance of LTO tape. Educating users on how to care for tape better ensures that data stored on tape really can be retrieved five, 10, 15, or more years from now.
• Responsibly disposing or recycling to reduce the environmental impact of LTO tape waste. Every tape drive and all tape media become waste at the end of its life. We need to recycle as much of this material as we can.

Data is the New Oil
Someone once noted that data has become the new oil. It has become the most valuable commodity in our modern world. But data storage comes with a price. The more we store, the more energy we consume and the more carbon we emit.

Moving large quantities of data from HDD to tape and placing it in active archives is the obvious solution. LTO tape storage media can store far more data with far less energy and carbon. It is a solution for a greener data storage world.

You can find out more about emerging use cases for active archives by listening to the recordings of the 2023 Active Archive Virtual Conference