Sustainability is a strategic imperative for all organisations as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and shareholder demands grow, along with rising energy costs and tightening budgets. Add to that digital transformation and expanding volumes of data causing data centres to consume even more energy than ever before, there is a significant shift to best-in-class, low-cost, low-carbon footprint solutions.

Two ways to reduce your Data Centre Footprint
1. Upgrade to an all-flash data centre with higher capacity QLC SSDs for more energy efficiency, compared to hybrid and HDD deployments.
2. Consolidation of workloads on fewer storage arrays enables reductions in rack space and data centre footprint.

Choosing the right storage solution for data centres is a critical part of achieving sustainability goals.

Lenovo Data Management solutions are designed for higher efficiency and lower power and cooling requirements to help customers meet environmental and sustainability goals and regulatory compliance for environmental standards.

A new level of high-capacity flash performance at a lower cost

To support AI and hybrid cloud workloads Lenovo’s ThinkSystem DG and DM3010H Enterprise Storage Arrays, OEM’d from NetApp, all come with faster and higher-capacity products for energy efficiency and lower TCO.

“The data management landscape is increasingly complex, and customers need solutions that offer the simplicity and flexibility of cloud with the performance and security of on-premises data management.” (Kamran Amini, Vice President & General Manager, Lenovo Server, Storage & Software Defined Infrastructure)

The DG products are all-flash arrays with QLC (4bits/cell or quad-level cell) NAND, targeted at read-intensive enterprise AI and other large dataset workloads, offering up to 6x faster data ingest than disk arrays at a claimed cost reduction of up to 50 per cent. They are also lower cost than TLC (3bits/cell) flash arrays.

The new DG5000 and larger DG7000 systems come with the base controller enclosures at 2RU and 4RU in size, respectively. They run NetApp’s ONTAP operating system to provide file, block and S3 access object storage. While the DM range consists of five models: the new DM3010H, DM3000H, DM5000H and DM7100H, with combined disk and SSD storage.

Top 5 sustainability benefits of an all-flash data centre

1. Flash uses fewer watts per TiB
The most significant sustainability benefit of flash-based storage over HDDs is its energy efficiency. Flash storage can support more data per watt of power consumed than HDDs. In a data centre, this efficiency can result in significant energy savings and lower carbon emissions.

2. Flash requires less energy for cooling and less space with QLCs
Flash storage generates less heat than HDDs because there are no moving parts, so it produces less friction. With fewer heat-generating components in a data centre, less energy is required to maintain optimal operating temperatures overall. This can lead to significant savings in cooling costs and can help reduce a data centre’s carbon footprint.

When you compare quad-level cell (QLC) flash to triple-level cell (TLC) flash, you see that the heat generated by QLC and TLC is similar, so the cooling requirements are comparable. However, QLC drives have a higher storage density, which means that data centres can store more data in the same physical space.

3. Flash involves cleaner manufacturing and sourcing
All manufacturing processes have sustainability challenges, and efforts are being made to improve sustainability across the entire electronics industry. What gives flash the edge is it is far less reliant on raw materials and rare-earth elements that are mined by digging vast open pits in the ground, which can contaminate the environment and disrupt ecosystems. And the less sustainable resource-intensive processes, such as lithography and chemical etching, to create the complex circuitry of the flash memory chips are changing. What’s more, as the capacity of NAND flash increases and operating lifespan improves, the carbon footprint associated with flash chip manufacturing is decreasing and is expected to continue improving over time. Plus, flash storage devices are more easily recyclable because their NAND chips can be remanufactured using previously used components without security or privacy risks.

4. Flash outperforms HDD
Flash offers superior performance, as it can handle more data in less time. Without powering spinning disks, flash delivers read speeds that are 10 times faster than HDDs. By reducing the time to access and process data, flash enables more efficient use of computing resources, which can help reduce overall energy consumption. For example, compared to a 7.2K RPM SATA disk, an SSD consumes one-ninth of the power per byte stored.

5. Flash costs less in the long run
With a lower overall TCO, although the initial cost of flash might still be slightly higher than that of HDDs in some cases, the TCO over the lifespan of flash-based storage is lower due to its reduced energy consumption, physical footprint, and lower maintenance costs. Using flash in data centres can result in real cost savings in the long term while helping you get closer to achieving your data centre sustainability goals in the immediate term. It’s a win: win.

Environmentally responsible organisations eager to modernise their IT infrastructure from hard disk drive (HDD) to flash are upgrading to quad-level cell (QLC) flash technology.

If you want to meet your ESG goals while advancing your digital initiatives with a modern storage solution, talk to us today. Schedule a call

For more information about our modern storage solutions download our Storage and Data Management solution guide. Download the eGuide

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