Data Storage Energy Efficiency in the Zettabyte Era

This paper reports on a study of energy consumption for data storage in data centres. Unlike previous estimates, which have been extrapolations of broad energy usage within the data centre, we take a bottom-up approach. We show that the growth in energy consumption can be mitigated somewhat by adopting a more aggressive policy of data archiving on long-term, low-energy, ?cold? storage; or more ideally purging data of little or no future value.