Symantec vows to help resellers address storage orphans

Symantec believes the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme will create new opportunities for its partners through data centre rationalisation projects when the legislation is introduced in April. In particular, the company aims to work with partners to target 'orphaned' data centre servers that are underutilised.

Whereas some UK data centre providers fear their costs will escalate in order to meet the new requirements, Symantec has launched a programme to encourage its partners to use its software to rationalise storage hardware requirements for their customers in order to cut power consumption and the associated carbon impact. The company's Green IT Infrastructure Model can see the number of servers required for data centres reduced by up to 40 per cent, principally through better use of storage resources and a more effective approach to mirroring.

"The sheer volume of unstructured data that is floating around within organisations and ends up in data centres has forced the addition of many more servers, but some of them are underutilised or unnecessary," said Darren Thomson, Senior Technical Director of Data Centre Management for Symantec. "Many servers are like storage orphans. They're in the data centre, but are effectively an abandoned part of the storage function. Rather than add more hardware, organisations can actually reduce the number of servers they need. For example, rather than having an additional server mirroring data from each server running a different application, the mirroring of four or five servers can be done by just one."

Symantec will work with its partners so that its software can best be applied to customers wanting to rationalise storage and believes the CRC will act as a new driver. The company's Stop Buying Storage campaign has seen it engage with partners across the UK to help customers understand how different software approaches can reduce data centre hardware requirements. Symantec says data centre energy costs can also be reduced by more than 20 per cent. Symantec has cut its own data centre energy requirements by 67 per cent.