Developments In Sustainable Storage Technology At The 2024 SDC

At the 2024 Storage Developers Conference (SDC) put on by storage trade group, SNIA, there were several sessions with updates on developments in more sustainable digital storage systems. With the accelerating need for digital storage and memory to support intense AI workloads, reducing the carbon contribution and improving the efficiency as well as reducing energy consumption of storage and memory have become extremely important.

The sessions focusing on sustainability included an update on storage Product Circularity by Jonmichael Hands and Arie van der Hoeven from Seagate Technology, a review of Storage Sustainability Initiatives by the Open Compute Project by Shruti Sethi from Microsoft, a talk by Piotr Modrzyk and David Gerstein from Leil storage and SaunaFS on Implementing Selective Write-Grouping for Enhanced Energy Savings, a Talk on The Promise of NVMe FDP in Data Center Sustainability by Roshan Nair and Arun George from Samsung Semiconductor India Research. Let’s look at the talks on Product Circularity and Sustainability Initiatives by the Open Compute Project.

In the Product Circularity session Jonmichael Hands and Arie van der Hoeven discussed progress with the IEEE P2883 2022 standard for data sanitization and certification as well as the OCP L.O.C.K. key management for NVMe devices and Caliptra Root of Trust initiatives. These are part of OCP’s Security Appraisal Framework and Enablement (S.A.F.E) program and have also been an active committee within SNIA. Regarding data recovery with various levels of expertise after sanitization methods they showed the following table. Purge sanitization in particular makes it unlikely that even the highest-level adversary can access data on a storage device.

They also pointed out that improvements are being made in tools to grade storage devices on their suitability for reuse (with a CDI health grading tool). There are also various ways to continue to use a storage device even as it loses storage capacity and some functionality, which might use AI/ML predictive failure. They also called for research on storage emissions. Carnegie Mellon University researchers with Microsoft Azure said that storage accounts for 33% of operational and 61% of embodied emissions in Azure data centers. Extended life for storage devices and secondary use could reduce these emissions.

The following slide shows how remanufacturing and refurbishing to achieve an average 8.5 year total use (significantly longer SSD life) could reduce NAND supply chain greenhouse gas emissions by 40%.

In a separate conversation with Jonmichael, he told me that there was some difficulty in getting some data centers to adopt and use P2883 over the last couple of years. The reason is that there were some earlier consumer grade HDDs whose root of trust was not well implemented, making it possible to extract the password from the drive. He said that modern HDDs, particularly those built for use in data centers had a reliable root of trust, enabling a secure crypto erase.

There was some progress at some hyperscale data centers though, where they employed very large machines which could shake a HDD apart, even a welded He-filled HDD, within a data center and then they dispose of the disks by shredding or some other destructive method. This at least allows recovering the rare-earth positioning actuator magnet and other reuseable components from the HDDs.

Shruti Sethi from Microsoft spoke about Sustainability Initiatives By Open Compute Project. OPC as indicated in the prior talk is focusing on embodied carbon and operational carbon in data centers. This includes carbon label and disclosure standardizing, data sanitization (mentioned earlier) as well as power and sustainability power metrics.

Embodied carbon is the carbon released in manufacturing components, such as the NAND flash chips in SSDs and operational carbon is released during the operation of these devices in data centers. As shown below, the OPC sustainability initiatives started in 2019 and continues with methods for understanding and controlling data center carbon content through 2024 and into the future.

Key focus areas are carbon transparency reporting and metrics, circularity and reuse and efficiency and interoperability. Some more details on the activities in these three focus groups is shown in the image below.

OCP partners with Infrastructure Masons to standardize a carbon disclosure format for carbon information exchange among value chain members. They are also developing a taxonomy for embodied carbon disclosures related to data center materials and equipment including a digital carbon label providing both calculated carbon levels and its corresponding methodology.

A partnership with the Circular Drive Initiative (represented at the SDC by Jonmichael an Arie) to formulate the criteria for a drive being secure data sanitized to provide drive reuse and to suggest carbon accounting for circularity and to incentivize primary and secondary users to enable circular reuse.

These efforts by OPC and SNIA could inform efforts within the IEEE Standards Association to develop e-liability standards for creating metrics and certification of the carbon content in supply chains. Since storage and memory devices play a big role in data center and enterprise operations, their carbon footprint will be an important contributor to the overall system carbon content. I will be connecting the speakers on sustainability and digital storage with the people in IEEE SA who are developing the e-liability standards.

The 2024 SNIA SDC showed sustainability efforts in the data storage industry. Determining operating and embedded carbon content is a valuable contribution.