Green IT Toolkit

Leeds cuts storage energy costs by 75 percent

Kablenet.com

Published: 29 Feb 2008 16:24 GMT

Leeds City Council has cut its storage energy costs per terabyte by three-quarters through installing new storage area network equipment.

The city has installed four ST6540 storage area network (SAN) arrays from Sun, replacing SE6920s from the same supplier and other directly attached storage hardware. The new equipment supports services including the city's Contact Leeds contact centre, council tax and benefits, housing, social services, the website and internal systems such as human resources.

Melvin Thompson, the city's Unix infrastructure manager and organiser of the move, told GC that the new equipment needs less than half the space of the old and is much easier to manage.

"It's difficult to make a mistake, to be honest," he said, with the new system using Santricity software. "With the old system, you had to have two pairs of eyes and be very careful of what you did."

The ST6540s use around 43 percent less power than the equipment they replaced and require 47 percent less power for air conditioning. As they have greater capacity, per terabyte, they use 74 percent less power directly and 76 percent less for cooling.

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Two of the arrays are used in production — one in the data centre and one in a secondary location, in aid of business continuity — and the other two are used for testing and development. The move allowed systems for highways, housing repairs and finance to be added to the central storage system.

The new system has 25TB (terabytes) of storage, of which around 72 percent is currently in use, although Thompson said the city had already increased its capacity during commissioning. He added that reaching 80 percent is likely to be the trigger for requesting more capacity for the system. "It's not one of those things where you have to think of it six months in advance. It's relatively easy," he said, with about a month required to add capacity.

Thompson said that the data migration was carried out during the working day, by mirroring the old system to the new one and applying updates to both systems, until that part of the new system was ready. The shift took place over a week in December.