Since Earth Day was proclaimed in 1970, protecting the environment has advanced from a grassroots effort to a global cause. We’ve all pitched in and taken steps to ensure the planet will be a healthy place to live for generations to come. From recycling to alternative sources of energy, the pursuit for a green future is on.

With the daily power consumption of a typical data center equivalent to the monthly power consumption of thousands of homes, it’s no surprise that a major focus of the green movement has turned to the data center. In fact, just this week The Green Grid Association announced new steps organizations can take to transform their data centers from an operational burden to a source of prosperity and sustainability.

But most of the hype around green data centers has focused on data center architecture, server consolidation, and new cooling strategies – and somehow storage infrastructure has flown under the radar. Today’s green data centers are a showcase for everything from liquid cooling to compact fluorescent light bulbs, but take a look at the storage infrastructure and you’re likely to see a collection of poorly utilized hardware consuming more power and pushing more carbon than they did 15 years ago.

The fact is, storage simply has not kept pace with power efficiency advancements. Like servers, storage systems spin disks 100% of the time, even if they are accessed only 15% of the time. This reminds me of my teenage years when I used to show off at red lights by red-lining my car engine: it may have seemed cool then, but as an adult you realize it’s dumb. So why are we doing the same thing with storage systems?

One of the first steps to reducing storage energy consumption is making data center managers aware that their systems are inactive a lot more than they think. Far too many of them are wasting large amounts of energy (and, of course, the other “green,” money) because their lightly used storage systems are running at full power, 24×7.

The good news is, there’s an effective solution to this problem: virtualization-driven storage consolidation. This approach reduces the number of storage devices needed, the amount of power required, the heat produced and, as a wonderful side effect, the operational and administrative costs of backup, archival, and the like. It can even decrease the environmental impact of storage hardware disposal, because data centers will use and dispose of fewer storage devices over time.

Storage virtualization uses software to eliminate the waste in unused storage by allowing users to set aside as much storage as they think they need. This eliminates the problem of running out of capacity and enables the movement or reallocation of storage capacity at any time. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that it extends the life of your infrastructure and eliminates the typical three- to five-year lead-time planning process for storage purchases. After all, who has the “green” these days to be doing that?