Green Storage #3 – Green Storage and SNIA Unplugged Fest

- by David Garrels

You may have recently seen a recent announcement from SNIA that they were hosting an “unplugged” fest at their facility in Colorado Springs April 22 - 23. HP and several other vendors came together to collect the baseline data needed to formulate the standards metrics for power consumption of storage products.

The first step in creating industry standard metrics for storage power consumption is understanding what to measure and how to measure it. And of course, having all vendors measure the same things the same ways. So SNIA hosted an event where the technical teams several vendors could come to the SNIA site and put their systems through the paces.

Each vendor brought a few of their key products (HP brought both disk arrays and tape libraries) and hooked them up to monitored Power Distribution Units (PDU’s) which provided real-time data of the power usage. Systems were tested both in Idle mode and in Peak Performance mode. The data collected from the PDU will be analyzed and used for the next step, which is to determine what common measures can be set by capacity, class of array/library, etc.

One interesting side note – as you might expect when this many products from different vendors are brought together quickly, there were a few minor glitches. Power connections, network configurations and other small issues would come up during the testing. But in the spirit of industry collaboration (and the importance of the work around power metrics & usage), everyone pulled together to get the problems resolved -- good collaboration amongst the different vendors.

We’re putting a lot of work into minimizing the power our storage systems use, and like to hear your feedback on the value of power management and metrics in your data center.