Improving Information Technology Sustainability With Modern Tape Storage

Brad Johns

As the world has made significant progress against the COVID-19 pandemic and world economies rebound, climate change and the broader subject of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) have become critical issues for companies worldwide. Nowhere is this experienced more than in the information technology (IT) industry, given its size and impact on consumers worldwide. The IT industry is rapidly changing with the evolution of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data, and the expansion of 5G networks resulting in the creation of massive quantities of information. Industry analysts estimate that the amount of data created, captured, or replicated will grow from 33 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025. Given the focus on sustainability and the large volumes of storage devices required to store the growing quantities of data in the coming years, organizations have an opportunity to reduce their carbon footprint, improve sustainability, and reduce expenses by migrating less frequently accessed (cold data) from hard disk drive (HDD)-based storage to modern tape storage. Industry analysts believe that 60%–80% of the data stored on HDDs is cold data. Consider a hypothetical example of assessing just the impact of the storage media of keeping 100 Pbyte of information for 10 years. Compared to an HDD-only solution, an active archive that moved 60% of the HDD resident data to tape reduced carbon emissions by 58%, reduced electronic waste (eWaste) by 51%, and reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 46%. In addition, if all the data is cold and is transferred to tape, carbon emissions are reduced by 97%, eWaste is decreased by 85%, and TCO is lowered by 78%. Globally, moving 60% of the HDD resident data to tape could reduce global carbon emissions by 79 million tons, making a meaningful contribution to reducing global carbon emissions. For enterprises, the financial benefits are significant enough to raise the possibility of funding the migration project entirely by the TCO savings while helping reduce global carbon emissions and eWaste.

Print ISSN
Electronic ISSN
2160-2492
Published
2023-08
Content type
Original Research
Keywords
Data, storage, sustainability, tape
DOI
10.5594/JMI.2023.3285282