Electricity Savings from Data Center SSDs Could Power an Entire Country, Researcher Says

Thus, a 20 to 40 percent changeover might be more likely by 2013, some analysts say.

"If the storage market completely eschews rotating mechanical media like HDDs in favor of SSDs, the projected energy savings could jump to 20 times the level described in iSuppli's forecast during the period from 2008 to 2013," Chander said. "SSDs' entry into the enterprise data centers is a boon for energy consumption and savings when these SSDs replace select short-stroked hard drives in the not-too-distant future."

The Environmental Protection Agency's EnergyStar program, which is scheduled to issue a set of power-saving specifications for servers on May 15, has determined that data centers in the United States account for about 2 percent of all the power used in the nation.

That outstrips the power consumption for all U.S. television sets (there are an estimated 200 million plugged into the power grid), which account for about 1.5 percent of the power-usage total.

With servers, network switches and storage arrays becoming ever more powerful as the demand for control, processing and storage of data workloads continues to rise almost exponentially, the demand for more and more power "from the wall" is putting heavy pressure on local utilities.

According to a report from NERC (North American Electric Reliability)—an industry group that oversees electrical grid operators—the United States is just barely generating enough electricity to meet current needs.

NERC projects that electrical demand will grow by 26 percent during the next 20 years. The group also has predicted that power shortages will become more frequent across the Northeast and western regions of the country, in addition to most of the state of Texas, within two years after the economy rebounds to health.

To read an overview and obtain more detail on the iSuppli report, go here.