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Reduce Data Protection Sprawl with the Veritas Flex Appliance and Save Energy

RogerStein
Moderator
Moderator
Employee

Up to 3% of all U.S. electricity powers data-centers according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Some energy savings are realized with power-saving “stand-by” modes, efficient cooling systems and by using Energy Star compliant equipment.

A more direct way to save energy in the data-center is to reduce the hardware footprint; reduce the number of servers or use existing servers more efficiently.  Reduce the hardware footprint and you will save space, power and cooling costs.

Enterprises often deploy multiple data protection systems. This can be for many reasons. Functional groups want systems designed around their specific data protection needs. Some departments need to backup large amounts of data spread across multiple data protection deployments. Each data protection deployment requires its own servers and storage. Over time this results in a sprawl of under-utilized data protection equipment. The sprawl becomes complex and difficult to manage and because the servers are not fully utilized, wastes a lot of energy. The sprawl has caused the hardware footprint to grow out of control.

This is where the Veritas Flex Appliance comes in.

The Flex appliance is not only Energy Star compliant but is a new concept in delivering enterprise data protection services based on container technology. Multiple deployments are configured on a Flex appliance from a menu of data protection microservices. A data protection system can be deployed in minutes by simply choosing the appropriate microservices and configuring them to meet the requirements of a specific department or functional group.

Now the data protection sprawl can be consolidated on a Flex appliance, reducing the hardware footprint, saving energy and still meeting diverse needs of the organization. To get an idea of the possible energy savings we did a calculation on consolidating six NetBackup 5230 Appliances each with 112 TB of storage on a single Flex appliance.

Six NetBackup 5230 appliances have six motherboards, 24 power supplies, take 66U of rack space, have a total of 672 TB of storage and burn almost 7400 watts. These six 5230 systems can be consolidated on a single 720TB Flex appliance taking 14U of rack space and using a little under 2400 watts. Flex offers a savings of about 5000 watts a 68% energy savings and a 79% saving in data center space!!

5230 vs Flex.jpg

Another benefit of the Flex appliance is that a data protection deployment can be configured and up and running in as little as 5 minutes. Now configurations can be optimized to save energy as data protection requirements change. With fixed hardware deployments reconfiguring a system is a big task. Often it is easier to let the installed system run in an unoptimized configuration ultimately wasting energy. This has all changed with the Flex appliance.

To find out more about to reduce data center sprawl, hardware footprint and energy usage, take a look at the Flex appliance webpage on Veritas.com.