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Data volumes continue to grow along with escalating energy costs. Technologists need solutions that both manage growth and reduce resource consumption across their data estate. Storage optimization and data lifecycle management techniques are essential. They help businesses save money, improve data flexibility, and build energy- and resource-efficient IT systems.
Panzura Symphony data services platform delivers an integrated solution for unstructured data management. It simplifies workflows and offers capabilities that directly contribute to sustainability initiatives by optimizing storage resources, reducing energy consumption, and minimizing electronic waste, thereby lowering the overall carbon footprint of IT operations. It supports smarter data lifecycle management, helping enterprise organizations handle data efficiently from creation to disposal.
Furthermore, Symphony provides the visibility necessary to implement and track progress towards sustainability goals within IT infrastructure. The platform enables automated, intelligent data discovery, compliance, governance, and movement including for sensitive data. This allows teams to optimize storage use and streamline data management — leading more efficient and precise data handling processes, lower energy use, and reduced costs.
Strategic Data Management for a Greener Enterprise
A key benefit of Symphony is its ability to break down data silos, providing a holistic view of all unstructured data in a single, extensible platform. It simplifies and automates complex data management tasks. This helps technologists and data stewards identify and eliminate redundant data and inefficient storage practices that contribute to unnecessary resource consumption.
Symphony’s metadata awareness provides context needed to identify these inefficiencies, enabling informed decisions about data placement and retention. This consolidated framework equips organizations to gain control over their data and supporting processes.
Symphony enables informed decisions about data placement, retention, and archiving, directly affecting energy consumption and its downstream impacts. Research by the Uptime Institute shows significant energy savings through data center consolidation, with modern facilities far outperforming legacy systems in efficiency. Symphony enhances energy efficiency allowing teams to dynamically optimize over-provisioning common in traditional systems, for example.
The platform achieves this through features like intelligent tiering and automated policy-governed data movement, ensuring that data resides on the most appropriate storage infrastructure based on its access frequency, classification tags and performance requirements, thereby minimizing the need for excessive and power-hungry primary storage.
Additionally, Symphony’s flexible support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments enables organizations to reduce energy use by strategically placing data across different cloud regions and storage tiers based on access needs, performance requirements, cost considerations, and business importance.
This allows technologists to leverage the inherent energy efficiencies of different cloud providers and storage classes, selecting options that align with their sustainability goals. For instance, archiving less frequently accessed data to colder, more energy-efficient cloud storage directly reduces a company’s data footprint and associated carbon emissions.
Discovery, Analysis, and Optimization for Environmental Impact
Symphony’s advanced data discovery and data analysis capabilities help teams to truly understand their data landscape. Through detailed metadata analysis, the platform helps identify data sprawl and wasteful storage use. For example, by understanding data “temperature” – how often it is accessed – and analyzing lightweight metadata rather than the full content of datasets, technologists can move rarely used data to cheaper, more energy-efficient storage options while maintaining large scale visibility and insights.
This intelligent optimization not only reduces storage costs but decreases the energy needed to power and cool infrastructure. Reducing the overall required storage capacity directly lowers the energy needed to power and cool storage infrastructure, contributing to a smaller carbon footprint.
Moreover, Symphony’s reporting and analytics capabilities can be used to derive insights into unstructured data usage patterns, highlighting areas of high consumption and waste to save costs and improve sustainability. The platform can provide detailed reports on storage consumption by department, data type, and access frequency, enabling organizations to identify and address inefficient storage practices and their associated energy expenditures.
These reports can also be configured to track the benefits of optimization strategies, enabling better decision-making, leading to more efficient resource allocation and lower energy consumption, supporting sustainability and cost savings. Making data-driven decisions about storage helps IT teams to proactively reduce their environmental impact.
Accelerating Governance, Compliance, and Sustainability
Automating governance and compliance tasks related to unstructured data makes it easier to reduce the risk of expensive penalties from data breaches or compliance failures. Furthermore, automating data retention policies and access controls strengthens data security and reduces the administrative burden, freeing up IT resources. Symphony’s ability to help teams report on costs and usage patterns for unstructured data fosters transparency and visibility.
The platform also provides insights into data lifecycle management, allowing data teams to understand how long data is being retained and identify opportunities for more efficient and sustainable data disposal practices. Its data analytics enable strategic decision-making about data retention, movement, and security policies.
These capabilities translate into more streamlined data management workflows that can be automated to further reduce operational costs. Seamless integration with existing IT systems and workflows enhances operational efficiency and minimizes manual effort, freeing up resources and teams to focus on other initiatives.
Policy-driven automation ensures that data is not retained longer than necessary, minimizing storage requirements and the associated energy consumption. Secure and automated data disposal at the end of its lifecycle also reduces electronic waste, supporting circular economy principles by extending hardware lifespan and minimizing the demand for new equipment.
Symphony offers detailed and customizable reporting that can include cost and usage metrics for driving these initiatives. Departments, line-of-business functions, and even geographic locations can measure their progress towards sustainability goals and communicate their efforts to stakeholders, facilitating compliance with emerging Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting frameworks.
In these cases, several key best practices are needed including establishing archiving strategies for inactive data, enforcing retention policies, and ensuring secure responsible data disposal at end-of-life. Symphony directly supports these best practices through its automated tiering, policy-based retention, and metadata-aware deletion capabilities, providing the framework for sustainable data management.
Adhering to these best practices, technologists can achieve a reduction in their unstructured data storage requirements and their overall energy consumption, contributing to a more sustainable, efficient, and environmentally responsible data management approach.
Fostering a Culture of Stewardship
Symphony can enable a strong culture of cost-effective energy management and long-term sustainability for unstructured data through enhanced visibility and accountability. The platform leverages data analytics to help teams optimize storage resources and minimize waste.
Symphony’s reporting capabilities can support specific sustainability metrics to different stakeholders, promoting a shared understanding of data-related energy and resource utilization from data storage and processing. It also facilitates reporting on sustainability attributes related to data.
That makes it easier to achieve reductions in operational costs and their overall sustainability impact while ensuring proper management of data assets. As we continue to navigate a data-driven global landscape, Symphony can play a critical role in ensuring that ongoing digital transformation does not undermine sustainability goals.
It allows enterprises to improve the operational efficiency of data-related processes and reduce bottom line costs while making a meaningful contribution to broader corporate objectives and environmental stewardship. Providing actionable insights and automation, Symphony helps technologists to become active participants and stewards in a stronger sustainability agenda.
This is one of two blog articles exploring how cutting-edge Panzura technology can drive sustainability improvements – from optimized resource utilization to reduced energy consumption and more. Read the companion article about Panzura CloudFS.
