There's (Short-Term) Hope For Greener Storage

Energy demands made by data center storage are expected to start leveling off soon as vendors start making storage with greener, more efficient components. But the effect won't last.IDC has recently published a study saying that the energy costs associated with storage in data centers will level off in the 2013-2014 time frame thanks to several trends:

Vendors will migrate to smaller (2.5-inch) hard drives.

Solid-state drives with no moving parts will catch on.

Users will shift to slower-spinning SATA drives, which offer twice as much storage capacity as traditional high performance drives.

Users will adopt technologies like compression and de-duplication that will enhance storage efficiency.

Users will figure out how to use existing storage capacity better.

But having reached a plateau in 2012-2014, energy demand will then start heading skyward again, concludes the 13-page $3,500 report, as capacity continues to expand.

The question remains as to why SMBs even need to buy servers and their related storage. The SAAS market and the cloud can handle many services for which servers are traditionally acquired, and if you already do have servers, virtualization can cut the need for more. But of course, business (like life) isn't that simple, and doing the optimum thing at all times is not practical.