I recently chatted with Analytico’s Tom Trainer about his new GigaOM Pro report, “The Future of Data Center Storage” (subscription required) and wrote about some of the insights I gleaned for Earth2Tech (thanks Katie!).

I was encouraged to find out that storage vendors like IBM and EMC aren’t just pursuing green IT strategies for their own operations and manufacturing, they’re also pushing products that perform more efficiently and help enterprises derive more value from the storage they already own.

Why is it important? Cloud computing and ballooning stores of data in server-rich environments will soon tax power grids. Many companies are already bumping their heads on their data center’s power ceiling. Simply throwing more storage at the problem is hardly a solution.

Two of the technologies that can help are data de-duplication (dedupe) and thin provisioning.  How? My Earth2Tech article explains, but essentially it boils down to a popular mantra that’s bandied about during these gloomy economic times: “Do more with less.”

Photo Credit: Flickr/Stuart Bryant