Storage body launches green power specs

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The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today released its initial Green Storage Initiative (GSI) Green Storage Power Measurement Specification for public review.

The specification has been designed using a storage system taxonomy and idle power measurement metric to act as an industry guideline for standards-setting organisations, government agencies and other stakeholders, including users.

The “Green Storage Taxonomy” classifies storage products based on energy consumption characteristics and application environments. And the baseline standard for idle power metrics can be applied as a uniform method for collecting idle power consumption measurements.

The taxonomy classification has been based on storage system feature criteria for the application environments they support. The feature criteria are, in turn, based on the required level of data protection, component redundancy, serviceability, data access time, and range of energy consumption. While the application environments are divided into five classes, ranging from small home/office applications (SOHO) to larger enterprise-oriented applications.

The storage system categories covered under the taxonomy are: online, near-online, removable media libraries, non-removable media libraries, infrastructure appliances and infrastructure switches.

There are many technologies on the market today that allow organisations to better manage their storage environments and reduce their power and cooling requirements, according to Juergen Arnold, SNIA Europe's chair and European liaison to SNIA GSI.

“SNIA Europe has been contributing to the EU [European Union] Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency driven by the European Commission to facilitate the promotion of greener storage,” he added.

An example of such best practice is the EU code related to storage that evaluates the energy efficiency of storage hardware in terms of the service delivered per Watt during the selection process.

But the SNIA GSI Idle Power Measurement specification provides a standard for testing and measuring idle storage power consumption in raw gigabytes per Watt (GB/W) according to a number of system-specific details.

The initiative plans to expand its work this year to include the development of standardised active power measurement guidelines and metrics, storage system power supply efficiency specifications and the publication of completed vendor test metrics.

Andrew Fanara of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR product development team welcomed the specification, concluding: “The industry metrics developed through SNIA’s Initiative will help to quantify energy consumption and identify new opportunities to improve data centre energy efficiency.”

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