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)
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More on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

Here’s a link to a new StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective on the emerging “Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

StorageIO Spring Keynote and Speaking tour V2.008

Several new keynote and speaking engagements involving myself have been added to the StorageIO events page including among others:

April 8th, 2008 – SNW Orlando FL
Beyond Green-Wash:
IT Data Center Power, Cooling, Floor Space and Environmental (PCFE) Topics and Trends V2.008

This talk will move past what are the issues and reasons for going green and get right to the point of what you can do today leveraging various technologies, techniques and best practices to address PCFE and green environmental issues including EHS, low power and economic sustainment in an environmental friendly manner as well as what to include in a long term green strategy for your data center.

Chicago, May 13th-15th – StorageDecisions
Clustered Storage:
From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0

The growth of structured and unstructured data continues at an explosive rate in most environments resulting in a constantly expanding data footprint requiring data and storage management resources. Similarly, the relative ease of use of NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing based storage, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), has led to a proliferation of NAS and Windows file servers which are not all that different from how the ease of use of personal computers (PCs) resulted in desktop and server sprawl. With the focus of many IT organizations today to do more with less, or, do more with what you have, clustered storage and clustered file serving have become a popular option to support modular, scalable and flexible growth. Clustered storage including clustered file serving, grid and web 2.0 based storage solutions are no longer confined to the specific high performance scientific applications they are commonly associated. Clustered storage serving is commonly being deployed to support a wide diversity of applications including commercial, entertainment or media, Web 2.0 and social networking along with grid, cloud and traditional scientific needs.

This session takes a look at among other topics:
? Look at what different clustered storage vendors are claiming and how their solutions differ
? Fact vs. Fiction, Myths and Realties of clustered storage
o Grid vs. Clusters, Cluster vs. Grid, what?s the differences
o Clustered storage is only for ultra large environments like Google
o Clustered file serving is only for high performance (HPC) environments
o SMBs and bulk storage applications can not benefit from clustered storage
? What are the caveats to be aware of when deploying clustered storage?
? What are some emerging trends and solutions to keep an eye on for clustered storage
? What are some questions that some vendors do not want you to ask about their solutions!

Green and Environmental Friendly Storage:
Practical Ways to Achieve Energy Efficiency

Green is in-and every storage vendor out there has a green story to tell. Despite the vendor and industry hyperbole about the environmental benefits of their products, there are still no standard metrics by which to measure and compare power consumption or energy efficiency claims. The challenge is sorting out and closing the gap between vendor green messaging and IT data center issues including power, cooling, floor space and other environmental topics including RoHS and e-waste disposal. This session looks at several practical techniques and technologies that you can leverage today to achieve an energy efficiency data center to sustain business growth in an economical and ecological friendly manner.

Topics that will be covered include among others:
? How truthful are vendor claims and what is ?Green wash?
? Facts and Fiction, Myths and Realities:
o Storage is cheaper to buy than to power
o Power avoidance vs. energy efficiency
o Are Solid State Devices (SSD) the silver bullet?
o Dedupe vs. Archive vs. Compression vs. Consolidation
? What?s real and achievable today, what are your options?
? Measuring and determining energy efficiency with emerging metrics
? How to do more with what you have and avoid forklift upgrades
? Who is the ?Greenest of them all? and where to learn more

I will also be keynoting at several TechTarget seminar series events around the U.S. including
StorageIO events page located here.

Cheers
GS

Trains Going “Green”, ah, well, maybe “Blue”…

With all of the global focus on going green, saving the planet, green IT and green storage all of which are good when like so many other things when done in moderation, the focus especially around IT and even aviation tends to be around green house gas (GHG), Co2/Carbon Offsets and so forth. Well, when I read this article about what India is doing to make their trains more green it got me thinking, perhaps a more moderate or balanced approach to green messaging should include more looking down at the ground than up in the sky.

That is, focus on some additional issues including ewaste with rules such as RoHS, WEEE among others in addition to the focus on reducing carbon and GHGs. By spending some time looking down as opposed to just looking up so to speak, you can reduce the chances of stepping in something undesirable as well as seeing real issues including power, cooling, floor space, environmental (PCFE) related items that can be addressed as well as on a go forward basis.

Interested in green IT and storage along with associated PCFE topics? I will be presenting at SNW in Orlando in April as well as Storage Decisions in May in Chicago on those and other related topics, learn more at the StorageIO events page. If you will be at any of those venues, stop by and say hello.

Cheers
GS

The Many Faces of Solid State Devices/Disks (SSD)

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a recent article I wrote for Enterprise Storage Forum titled “Not a Flash in the PAN” providing a synopsis of the many faces, implementations and forms of SSD based technologies that includes several links to other related content.

A popular topic over the past year or so has been SSD with FLASH based storage for laptops, also sometimes referred to as hybrid disk drives along with announcements late last year by companies such as Texas Memory Systems (TMS) of a FLASH based storage system combining DRAM for high speed cache in their RAMSAN-500 and more recently EMC adding support for FLASH based SSD devices in their DMX4 systems as a tier-0 to co-exist with other tier-1 (fast FC) and tier-2 (SATA) drives.

Solid State Disks/Devices (SSD) or memory based storage mediums have been around for decades, they continue to evolve using different types of memory ranging from volatile dynamic random access (DRAM) memory to persistent or non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) and various derivatives of NAND FLASH among other users. Likewise, the capacity cost points, performance, reliability, packaging, interfaces and power consumption all continue to improve.

SSD in general, is a technology that has been miss-understood over the decades particularly when simply compared on a cost per capacity (e.g. dollar per GByte) basis which is an unfair comparison. The more approaches comparison is to look at how much work or amount of activity for example transactions per second, NFS operations per second, IOPS or email messages that can be processed in a given amount of time and then comparing the amount of power and number of devices to achieve a desired level of performance. Granted SSD and in particular DRAM based systems cost more on a GByte or TByte basis than magnetic hard disk drives however it also requires more HDDs and controllers to achieve the same level of performance not to mention requiring more power and cooling than compared to a typical SSD based device.

The many faces of SSD range from low cost consumer grade products based on consumer FLASH products to high performance DRAM based caches and devices for enterprise storage applications. Over the past year or so, SSD have re-emerged for those who are familiar with the technology, and emerged or appeared for those new to the various implementations and technologies leading to another up swinging in the historic up and down cycles of SSD adoption and technology evolution in the industry.

This time around, a few things are different and I believe that SSD in general, that is, the many difference faces of SSD will have staying power and not fade away into the shadows only to re-emerge a few years later as has been the case in the past.

The reason I have this opinion is based on two basic premises which are economics and ecological”. Given the focus on reducing or containing costs, doing more with what you have and environmental or ecological awareness in the race to green the data center and green storage, improving on the economics with more energy efficiency storage, that is, enabling your storage to do more work with less energy as opposed to avoiding energy consumption, has the by product of improved economics (cost savings and improved resource utilization and better service delivery) along with ecological (better use of energy or less use of energy).

Current implementations of SSD based solutions are addressing both the energy efficiency topics to enable better energy efficiency ranging from maximizing battery life to boosting performance while drawing less power. Consequently we are now seeing SSD in general are not only being used for boosting performance, also we are seeing it as one of many different tools to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental or green storage issues.

Here’s a link to a StorageIO industry trends and perspectives white paper at www.storageio.com/xreports.htm.

Here’s the bottom line, there are many faces to SSD. SSD (FLASH or DRAM) based solutions and devices have a place in a tiered storage environment as a Tier-0 or as an alternative in some laptop or other servers where appropriate. SSD compliments other technologies and SSD benefits from being paired with other technologies including high performance storage for tier-1 and near-line or tier-2 storage implementing intelligent power management (IPM).

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

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All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved