Several vendors, including EMC and Network Appliance, have recently argued that redriving arrays with higher capacity drives is greener because you get more space for the same electrical costs. Am I buying this?
Nope.
Going to bigger drives, it seems to me, simply means that you are going to push additional demands out onto your shadow infrastructure — which is to say, data protection infrastructure. RAID 5 won’t work anymore because rebuilding big drive sets takes way too long. So, we are looking at some exotic non-standard RAIDing methods that bind us to a particular vendor’s gear (with all of the cost inefficiencies associated with lock-ins) or we go to standard RAID methods like mirroring, which requires doubling up on the number of drives we deploy (hence, more power load, not less).
Am I missing something here?
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