Australian businesses are a pragmatic lot. They are focused on either making money or saving money - and always doing what they can with what they have.

The Green push of late tends to manifest itself for Australian businesses in the practicalities of a) running out of power b) running out of space and c) recognising the cost of power from a dollar and carbon perspective.

IT Storage consumes over 30% of the power required in a typical data centre, and is the fastest growing IT infrastructure element as our world thrives on data. This puts it right into the cross-hairs of consideration when discussing power consumption and carbon overhead. In the last 18 months, I have seen a distinct shift in customer thinking and focus around technologies that can provide tangible cost savings in these areas. For example, the use of "thin provisioning" to reduce physical storage consumption has become a mandatory requirement for new storage footprint. The intense focus on power consumption of new equipment PRIOR to purchase is also a new trend. In the past, customers only worried about power and weight of equipment post-purchase, now it is a fundamental part of the selection process.

The storage industry is responding to this shift in customer focus by delivering enabling technologies such as:

• Virtualisation: to create more flexible data centres with a configurable "heat footprint"
• Power Efficient Storage: that consumes 30-50% less power than previous generation products using power-powered components and higher-density storage
• Disk Drive Power Down: to shut down disk drives that are not engaged in active work
• Thin Provisioning: to dramatically drive up storage utilisation and reduce waste
• Deduplication: to reduce data stored on disk for backup by factors of up to 25:1

With Hitachi’s rich heritage as a manufacturer, we aim to be not just a supplier of these technologies but to also be green in our own manufacturing process.

The upcoming Carbon Trading scheme is starting to create uncertainty for IT departments. They realise that before long Boards will be putting pressure on organisations to respond to such schemes by operating competitively and being in an advantageous carbon position; however specific direction is scant. Many of our customers are being proactive in their purchasing decisions by factoring in the carbon-element of new infrastructure so as to be well positioned for any such training scheme.

In the past, IT never saw the power bill - all this has now changed, and well-proven technologies are being marshalled to address the issue of cost and carbon.

Simon Elisha is Chief Technologist A/NZ at Hitachi Data Systems. He specialises in both hardware and software enterprise storage solutions including virtualisation data protection, storage management, high availability, data archival and compliance. A well-known public speaker and media commentator in the storage industry, Simon has previously held senior roles at VERITAS Software, PricewaterhouseCoopers and EDS.