Arkivum’s Green Credentials

Digital Archiving Can Reduce Your Carbon Footprint and Your Power Consumption Too

Using the Arkivum digital archiving service not only guarantees to keep your data safe and secure forever but being a remote service it will dramatically reduce a customer’s power consumption and heat generation, to offer a carbon footprint estimated at one tenth of a typical in-house solution.

Data tape, the chosen method of archiving at our data centres uses very little energy, making it one of the greenest technologies around.  It is only when data is being accessed that energy is needed to power the drives and read the data - otherwise tapes simply sit in their slots in the library needing no power at all.  This means just a couple of tape drives and a few hundred watts is typically sufficient to serve the needs of a petabyte of archive data.

If you’re looking for hard facts a report from the Clipper Group [1] looked at the fraction of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) taken up by the energy needed to run archival storage of data over a 12 year period.  It estimated energy to be 12.6% of the TCO for a hard drive solution and only 0.4% for a solution based on data tape. 

That makes data tape over 30x more energy efficient than hard drive storage.  But it gets better than that.  Because the TCO of data tape is much lower than the TCO for hard drives in their analysis, the money spent on power for the hard drive solution was actually 238 times higher than data tape!  Indeed Clipper calculated that the cost of power alone for a hard drive solution over 12 years is more than the entire cost of using data tape. 

There are plenty of reports that sing the praises of data tape but here at Arkivum we like to take a balanced approach so we have looked at the counter-arguments too and put it all into one place. Click here to download the How Green Is Your Archive whitepaper.

 [1]  David Reine and Mike Kahn (2010) In Search of the Long-Term Archiving Solution - Tape Delivers Significant TCO Advantage over Disk. Dec 23, 2010.   Report from the Clipper Group.  http://www.lto.org/pdf/2010_December_Archive%20TCO.pdf