In this episode, Chris talks to Justin Emerson from Pure Storage about modern design considerations for power-efficient storage. The cost of powering data centres has increased massively over the last 12 months, driven by the global economy and recovery from COVID-19. At a component level, servers are increasing their power usage, with faster processors and memory, plus the use of power-hungry GPUs. By contrast, storage power demands have reduced, as flash takes over from HDDs. Of course, this doesn't mean there aren't still considerations to make. Vendors such as Pure Storage have developed custom flash modules and introduced other design features to optimise on performance per watt, while deliver increasing densities. Justin explains how Pure has achieved this and what we should look out for in the future.

We discuss the Pure ESG report, which can be found here - https://www.purestorage.com/company/corporate-social-responsibility.html. Justin also mentions the Accelerate TechFest event on 8th June 2022, more details are available here - https://www.purestorage.com/accelerate.html.

Elapsed Time: 00:50:03

Timeline

00:00:00 - Intros

00:01:30 - Power costs are driving the need for efficiency

00:02:30 - Power is the limiting factor on data centre design

00:03:40 - Flash generations implicitly drive power efficiencies

00:04:30 - Higher clock speeds drive higher power usage

00:06:15 - What are the hyper-scalers doing with power efficiency?

00:07:10 - Cooling is also a big efficiency factor

00:08:05 - HDDs are still hugely relevant for hyper-scalers

00:10:10 - Can businesses hedge power costs for their data centres?

00:12:35 - If you’re in a co-lo, power costs could be unpredictable

00:14:30 - In-data centre power management is creating challenges

00:17:05 - Pure has released an ESG report including power efficiency

00:18:35 - Product longevity is important to sustainability

00:20:30 - Evergreen and product design allows Pure to reduce waste

00:23:15 - What is DirectFlash?

00:26:00 - Commodity drives have DRAM and make independent decisions

00:28:05 - Couldn’t I just use the Ruler form factor?

00:30:00 - FlashArray//C uses QLC - is this more power-efficient?

00:33:42 - What software enhancements are used to increase efficiency?

00:36:00 - Data reduction features need to balance write amplification with efficiency

00:38:10 - How do end-users make decisions about picking the right products?

00:40:15 - There are no recognised metrics for measuring storage power/performance efficiency

00:44:30 - What future improvements should we expect?

00:46:50 - Code and protocol efficiency will improve power usage

00:48:15 - Wrap Up

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