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Promoting energy efficiency
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The SNIA Green Storage Power Measurement Specification.
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By Tom Clark, Brocade – SNIA GSI Board Member
As the umbrella organization for providers and consumers of active I/O load. In addition, the current Specification includes
networked storage technologies, the Storage Networking requirements for disclosure, audit and results management by
TIVE SNIA Industry Association has led the development of new storage the SNIA so that in the future customers will be able to
solutions and standards for over ten years.This pioneering access a database of test results to make informed decisions
work is funded by SNIA member companies and largely on storage equipment selection.
E INITIA
staffed by technical volunteers made available by SNIA
G members to advance the industry as a whole.The release of Although all data storage technology has the common goal of
the new SNIA Green Storage Power Measurement safeguarding data and making it available to applications, there
ORA
Specification is result of over two years of cooperative is a wide spectrum of storage products in the market.
technical activity by the SNIA Green Storage Technical Frequently accessed data, for example, often requires spinning
Working Group (GS TWG) with the support of the SNIA disk media or solid state storage. Long term data storage is
Green Storage Initiative (GSI). It is the first SNIA technical often implemented via tape or optical storage. In addition,
GREEN ST specification document focused on promoting energy different applications may have very different requirements
efficiency for networked storage and provides both for performance and availability. Mission-critical applications
SNIA
manufacturers and customers with a technical framework for typically require both high performance and 99.999%
evaluating the energy impact of storage systems. availability, and that in turn requires more hardware and
redundant energy consuming components. Creating a
Storage is only one component of a complex data center taxonomy that defines the different categories of storage
ecosystem, but along with servers and network infrastructure solutions and the various classes within each category is
contributes to the often significant power and cooling therefore an essential first step in differentiating the various
requirements of modern data centers. In difficult economic systems for energy measurement.
times, data center managers are attempting to reduce
operational costs and are finding that energy for powering The SNIA Green Storage Power Measurement Specification
and cooling IT equipment is an ever-increasing portion of the taxonomy defines six broad categories of storage
total data center budget. In addition, some data centers technologies:
simply cannot provide additional power and may lack space Online - storage arrays with spinning media or solid state
to accommodate increasing requests for more storage and disk;
processing capability. New energy efficient solutions are Near-Online - storage systems such as MAID for
needed, and that in turn requires new means to measure and infrequent data access ;
validate power consumption of diverse IT components. For Removable-Media Library - tape libraries and
storage elements, the SNIA Green Storage Power subsystems;
Measurement Specification provides the initial framework for Virtual Media Library - disk or optical systems emulating
determining the energy efficiency of storage systems and tape libraries;
infrastructure and creates a foundation for future Infrastructure Appliance - virtualization, data de-
standardization of energy efficiency metrics for storage. duplication or other appliances;
The current version of the SNIA Green Storage Power Infrastructure Interconnect Elements - Fibre Channel
Measurement Specification includes definitions of relevant or IP switches and directors.
terms, a taxonomy for classifying different types of storage
systems, and a framework for test methodology for systems A typical data center will have storage elements from all six
in an idle state. Subsequent work of the GS TWG in 2009 categories, although online storage arrays, tape libraries and
will include test methodology for storage systems under fabric switches are most common. In sheer volume, the
MAR/APR 09 WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM
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