Tag: Green

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Intelligent Power Management (IPM) and second generation MAID 2.0 on the rise

Storage I/O trends

In case you missed it today, Adaptec announced that they are the 1st vendor “This Week” to add support for Intelligent Power Management (IPM) to their storage systems. Adaptec joins a growing list of vendors who are deploying, or, who are program announcing some variation of IPM and second generation MAID 2.0 ability including support for different types of tiered disk drives including various combinations of Fibre Channel and SAS as well as SATA.

As a quick refresh, Massive or Monolithic Arrays of Idle or Inactive Disks (MAID) was popularized by 1st generation MAID vendor Copan who spins down disk drives to avoid energy usage. One of the challenges with 1st generation MAID is the poor performance by being able to only have at most 25% of the disk drives spinning at any time to transfer data when needed.

This is a balancing act between achieving energy avoidance and associated benefits vs. maintaining performance to move data when needed particularly for large restoration to support BC/DR or other purposes. Granted, 1st generation MAID systems like those from Copan while positioned as alternatives to high-performance disk storage systems to amplify potential energy savings on one hand, or, to put as an alternative to magnetic tape by providing random restore capability. The reality is that 1st generation MAID systems are finding their niche not for on-line primary or even on-line secondary storage, nor as a direct replacement for tape or even disk based libraries to support large-scale BC/DR, rather, in a sweet spot between secondary and near-line disk libraries and virtual tape libraries with a target application of very infrequently accessed of data.

Second generation MAID, aka MAID 2.0 is an evolution of the general technologies and capabilities extending functionality and flexibility while addressing quality of service (QoS), performance, availability, capacity and energy consumption using IPM also known as Adaptive Power Management (APM), dynamic bandwidth switching or scaling (DBS) among other names. The basic premise is to add flexibility building on 1st generation characteristics including data protection, resiliency and pro-active part or drive monitoring. Another basic premise of IPM. and MAID 2.0. solutions is to allow the performance and subsequent energy usage to vary, which is to cut the amount of performance and energy usage during in-active times, yet, when data needs to be accessed, to allow full performance without penalties for energy savings.

Second generation MAID solutions can be characterized by multiple power saving modes as well as flexible performance to adjust to changing workload and application needs. Another characteristic is the ability to work across different types of disk drives including Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA as opposed to only SATA drives found in 1st generation solutions as well as for the IPM or MAID 2.0 functionality to exist in a standard storage system or array instead of in a purpose-built dedicated storage system. Other capabilities include support for more granular power settings down to a RAID group or LUN level instead of across an entire array or storage system as well as support for different RAID levels among other features.

Examples of vendors who have either announced product or made statements of direction with regard to MAID 2.0 and IPM enabled storage systems include:

Adaptec (Today), Datadirect, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HGST (Hitachi Disk Drives), NEC, Nexsan, and Xyratex among others on a growing list of solutions.

For applications and data storage needs that need good performance and QoS over a range of changing usage conditions to balance good performance when needed to efficiently get work done to boost productivity, while saving or avoiding energy when little or no work needs to be done, take a look at current and emerging IPM and MAID 2.0 enabled storage systems as part of a tiered storage strategy to discuss power, cooling, floor-space and EHS (PCFE) related issues.

To learn more, check out the StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective white paper Intelligent Power Management (IPM) and MAID 2.0 and visit www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com well as www.storageio.com.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Closing the Green Gap – Green washing may be endangered, however addressing real green issues is here to stay

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a new article I wrote that just appeared over at Enterprise Storage Forum called Closing the Green Storage Gap.

Not all ‘green’ IT solutions or messages are created equal. Regardless of political views, the reality is that for business and IT sustainability, a focus on ecological issues and more importantly, their economic aspects cannot be ignored.

There are business benefits to using the most energy-efficient IT solutions to meet different data and application requirements. However, vendors are busy promoting ‘green’ stories and solutions that often miss where IT organization challenges and mandates exist. This article examines the growing gap between green messaging, or ‘Green Wash,’ and how to close the gap and enable IT organization issues to be addressed today in a way that sustains business growth in an economic and ecologically friendly way.

Have a read and a good weekend.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Links to Upcoming and Recent Webcasts and Videocasts

Here are links to several recent and upcoming Webcast and video casts covering a wide range of topics. Some of these free Webcast and video casts may require registration.

Industry Trends & Perspectives – Data Protection for Virtual Server Environments

Next Generation Data Centers Today: What’s New with Storage and Networking

Hot Storage Trends for 2008

Expanding your Channel Business with Performance and Capacity Planning

Top Ten I/O Strategies for the Green and Virtual Data Center

Cheers
Greg Schulz – StorageIO

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Green, Virtual, Servers, Storage and Networking 2008 Beijing Olympics

Storage I/O trends

How about those opening 2008 Beijing Olympic ceremonies on NBC last night?

If you were like me, I had my DVR capture the event while out enjoying the nice August evening with some friends doing some relaxing and fishing (we did catch and release fish!) on the scenic St. Croix river.

John Nelson with a small mouth bass caught and released on the St. Croix River During 2008 Beijing Olympics
Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

John Nelson with a northern pike (swamp shark) caught and released on the St. Croix River During 2008 Beijing Olympics
Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

A young bald eagle seen during fishing on the St. Croix river during opening of 2008 Olympic games
A young bald eagle seen during fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

The reason I bring up the Olympics, servers, storage, networking, virtualization and green topics are a couple of themes. One being all the news and content available to keep track of what is happening with the games taking place all of which is being stored on servers, storage and relying on networks to access the rich media and unstructured data via the web or traditional media. The 2008 summer games are also being described as the on-line and virtual olympics. The amount of storage being used to store digital data from the 2008 Olympics for later playback, which then gets recorded on DVRs if not watched in real-time is staggering as are the number of servers and networking capabilities being used. In addition to the video, audio, still photos, text and blogs, then there are the security cameras in Beijing generating massive amounts of digital data.

For those who track or keep an eye or ear open towards data and storage management, the amount of data that continues to grow and number of copies that get created should be a familiar theme. Of course, you would then have heard that the magic elixir is to simply de-dupe everything. That is reduce your data footprint by eliminating all of those extra copies however easier said then done, especially when a copy of the games is being transmitted and saved to millions of DVRs or other forms of data storage servers around the world.

For the time being, I prefer that my DVR support more usable storage capacity and real-time compression so that I can keep more copies of my favorite shows and of course the Olympics all in HDTV, which of course chews up storage space faster than a highly animated PowerPoint slide deck from your favorite vendors most recent, or, upcoming product announcements.

The other theme is in addition to being Olympic time, as well as late summer here in the northern hemisphere or winter for our friends in the summer hemisphere, its also pre-briefing and early product announcement time for the barrage of fall server, storage, networking, I/O, software, virtualization and green related solutions. So far, Im not sure if its the Olympics or what, however the bait line on the upcoming announcements and briefings include the tags “Industry First”, “Industry Unique”, “Only Vendor”, “Only Product”, “Revolutionary”, “First Vendor” or “First Product”, “Fastest”, “Largest”, “Greenest” among other interesting spins and twists that would even make an Olympic gymnast dizzy.

So enjoy the Olympic , keep those hard disk drives in your DVR cool while managing the usable capacity and watch for more gold medal attempts both from Beijing, as well as from your favorite IT vendors coming to a podium to you soon with their upcoming announcements, some of which may be award winning. Also check out www.greendatastorage.com which is now also pointed to by www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com that has a new look and feel as well as some updated content with more on the way.

Cheers
gs

technorati tags: Green Gap, Green Hype, Green IT, PCFE, The Green and Virtual Data Center, Virtualization, StorageIO, Green Washing

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SMB capacity planning; Focusing on energy conservation

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a new tip I wrote that is posted over at SearchSMBStorage on Capacity Planning and energy conservation.

Here are some added links to other recent tips I wrote and posted at a SearchSMBStorage:

Improve your storage energy efficiency

Data protection for virtual server environments

Data footprint reduction for SMBs

Is clustered NAS for SMBs?

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Hot Storage Topics Converge on Chicago Next Week

Storage I/O trends

Next week in Chicago (May 12th) at Storage Strategies, the event for channel professional held the evening before StorageDecisions I will be talking about Hot Storage Topics for 2008 including addressing data protection for virtual environments, power cooling floor space environmental (PCFE) aka green items and the “Green Gap”, data footprint reduction for both on-line active and changing data using real-time data compression, archiving for in-active or dormant data and de-dupe for backup data. Also on the list of hot topics will be clustered NAS and clustered storage for Web 2.0 along with other timely and relevant items.

At the StorageDecisions event, I will be talking about ?Green and Environmental Friendly Storage? Tuesday morning May 13th in the presentation ?Practical Ways to Achieve Energy Efficiency – Power, Cooling, Floor-Space and Environmental (PCFE) Issues and Trends? looking at different issues including the ?Green Gap? or disconnect between messaging and common IT data center issues along with various options to boost efficiency for both active and in-active data and storage resources.

Also while at StorageDecisions next week, on Wednesday the 14th I will be talking about clustered storage including clustered NAS in the session ?Clustered Storage – ?From SMB, to Scientific, to File Serving, to Commercial, Social Networking and Web 2.0?. Given some recent vendor technology announcements and statements of direction, Web 2.0 and unstructured data are gaining popularity as are the confusing options or different types of clustered storage solutions including ?Cluster Wanna Bee?s?. If you are in Chicago next week, stop in and check out the event and if you can attend any of my sessions, stop by and say hello.

Cheers
GS

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Power, Cooling, Floor-space, Environmental (PCFE) and Green Metrics

The Metrics and Measurement page on www.greendatastorage.com has been updated along with other pages covering IT data center PCFE and green topics for servers, storage, networks and facilities. Have a look.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Do Disk based VTLs draw less power than Tape?

The tape is dead debates rage on as they have for a decades which make for good press and discussion or debate during slow times, similar to coverage of what Britney Spears or Paris Hilton are or are not wearing.

In the on-going debates and Greenwashing of what technology or vendor is greener to prevent global warming, some recent tape is dead flare-ups have occurred including one hinting that tape libraries can draw more power than a disk based VTL with de-dupe are discussed over on Tony Pearson of IBM fame blog site as well as Beth Pariseau of TechTarget StorageSoup site.

I posted some comments on those sites along along with a link to a StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective report titled “Energy Savings without Performance Compromise” as an example (look for an updated version of the comparison charts in the report in the not so distant future). The report looks at how different storage tiers including on-line disk, MAID, MAID 2.0 and tape libraries vary to address different PCFE (power, cooling, floor-space, environment) issues while supporting various service levels including performance, availability, capacity and energy use.

Additional related material can be found at www.storageio.com and www.greendatastorage.com including the Industry Trends and Perspective Report Business “Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction in general covering archiving, compression (on-line and off-line) along with de-duplication

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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SNW Spring 2008

The Spring 2008 edition of SNW was this past week in Orlando FL and I spent a couple of days there for some briefings as well as give a presentation.

From an attendance standpoint, certainly it did not feel or look like one of the largest SNW events that I have been to over that past several years and yes there were in fact some real IT personal there, however nothing like on the scale of what you would see at a Storage Decisions, VMworld or any of the other customer/IT personal focused show.

However keeping in mind that SNW is first a vendor and SNIA event that just happens to have some IT customers attending. This edition of SNW seemed more sparse given the size of the venue and how spread out things were along with the high degree of over-subscription or number of concurrent sessions (which had from 7 to up to 8 sessions at the same time) that are trying to be squeezed into a small timeframe with a relatively small audience compared to other events.

For me it was time well spent with the great meetings and ad-hoc discussions that I had in the short period while in Orlando even with the decline in attendance compared to past years. There is a shift going on and there are certainly many other large events to compete with SNW for attendees and participants many of which particularly for IT customers seem to be growing in popularity.

IMHO its time for the SNW show organizers to take a good look at the model of SNW Europe for some ideas on how to tweak and tune the US-based event especially if they want to continue to do a twice a year event.

Here’s a link to download a copy of my presentation Beyond Green-wash: Power, Cooling, Floor-space, Environmental (PCFE) and green Issues, Trends and Solutions from SNW.

On the StorageIO website you can find links to industry Trends and Perspective white papers as well as other content addressing PCFE and green related issues including MAID, Intelligent Power Management and MAID 2.0, SSD, Virtualization and Data Footprint Reduction among others.

Drop me a note or comment about what you are encountering or your thoughts or any interesting findings about IT data center PCFE and green issues and check out storageioblog.com if you have not recently done so.

Ok, nuff said, for now…

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Atrato Part Deux

As a follow-up note to a previous post, Atrato last week came out of stealth mode, well, a little bit more about their solution with some interesting claims, however details remain sketchy if not in-consistent and looking forward to hearing more actual details.

Beth Pariseau over at TechTarget StorageSoup has an assimilation of information regarding Atrato and their recent announcements, Have a read…

Cheers
GS

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Geek Gadgets: Kill A Watt Meter

For the geek who has or thinks they have all the newest and greatest toys and gadgets add this Kill A Watt Meter available from venues including Amazon to your list if you don’t have one already to see how much electric power your gadgets are consuming.

Kill A Watt Meter via Amazon.com

Mine has already come in handy for sizing and load balancing circuits around the house, sizing an APC battery backed UPS for some home electronics and other uses.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the greenest of them all?

GreenerComputing has an article covering Greener Electronics and specfricaly the current

Greenpeace ranking of consumer oritited electronic products

Any surprises? Sony Viao and Sony Ericcson Cellphones are at the top of the list along with Samsung, Lenovo and Dell. Well Apple is no longer at the actual bottom of the list, which is now occupied by the likes of Nintendo (bottom), Philips, Microsoft (xbox) and Sharp. Agree or disagree, take it for what it is, it is what is?

Learn more about power, cooling, floorspace, environmental (PCFE) and associated green topics at www.greendatastorage.com

Cheers
GS