SNIA unveils Green Storage Power Measurement specification
10 February, 2009
By Liam Lahey |
The San Jose, Calif.-based Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is soliciting public review and comment for its initial Green Storage Initiative (GSI) Green Storage Power Measurement specification.
Public review of the draft specification was released on Jan. 21 and it runs for 60 days. SNIA's aim is to gather as much feedback as possible across two primary areas: the value of the specification and the technical aspects of the specification.
"We want to ensure that the industry and industry participants -- vendors, end users, channel partners, ISVs, OEMs, public regulators or government bodies -- will receive value from the specification," said Al Thomason, vice chair of the SNIA Green Storage Initiative and a storage portfolio manager for IBM in Beaverton, Ore. "Keeping that in-mind, we then need to ensure the technical aspects of the specification are solid and support that value."
The Green Storage Power Measurement specification includes a "Green Storage Taxonomy" for classifying storage products based on energy consumption characteristics and application environments, as well as a baseline standard for idle power metrics which can be applied as a uniform method for collecting idle power consumption measurements.
"This initial release of the Green Storage Power Measurement specification will play an important role moving forward in helping the storage industry, standards-setting organizations, and global governmental agencies measure and shape the energy and power efficiency of storage systems," said Leah Schoeb, chairperson of the SNIA Green Storage Initiative. "The Green Storage Initiative is dedicated to applying the technical and educational expertise of our members to help develop more energy efficient solutions for the IT industry."
Increased economic and societal pressures provide opportunity for organizations to lower their overall energy usage footprints, and Thomason said industry-wide awareness of the issue is increasing rapidly.
"The concept of energy and storage in the datacenter has been growing for about two years now. The big focus started with servers, then incorporated HVAC and now storage has become the next area of priority," he said. "We believe that the ongoing focus and awareness will continue to increase on storage and the industry will start to address how they will attack this challenge."
The Green Storage Taxonomy was designed to classify storage systems based on feature criteria for the application environments that they are intended to support. The application environments are divided into five categories (classes) ranging from small home/office applications (SOHO) to larger enterprise-oriented applications. The feature criteria for each storage system class are based on the required level of data protection, component redundancy, serviceability, data access time, and range of energy consumption.
"The U.S. EPA welcomes SNIA's leadership and ability to reach across the industry to address the growing energy challenges confronting data center operators across the globe," said Andrew Fanara, of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR Product Development Team, in a statement. "The industry metrics developed through SNIA's Green Storage Initiative will help to quantify energy consumption and identify new opportunities to improve data center energy efficiency."
The storage system categories covered under the Green Storage Taxonomy are: Online, Near-Online, Removable Media Libraries, Non-Removable Media Libraries, Infrastructure Appliances, and Infrastructure Switches.
The Idle Power Measurement specification outlines a standard for testing and measuring storage power consumption while idle. The idle power measurements would be reported in raw GB per Watt (GB/W) based on:
*Manufacturer model number
*Raw storage capacity
*Storage media RPM and interface of each type of storage media within the storage device
*The number of enclosures/systems in the online or near-online taxonomy category
*The number of tape drives for systems in the removable-media library taxonomy category.
Throughout 2009, SNIA's GSI would expand the Green Storage Power Measurement specification to include development of standardized active power measurement guidelines and metrics, standardized storage system power supply efficiency specifications as well as promotion and publication of each vendor's completed test metrics.
"The current specification is focused on taxonomy and idle storage measurement. Throughout 2009 we plan to refine this specification based upon the industry feedback we receive and also begin work on the active storage measurement specification as well as a process to validate and share the results from measuring a specific storage device or technology," Thomason added. "For example, if a vendor applies the specification and metric against one of their products, the SNIA wants to ensure there is a way for that vendor to submit their result for review and it would undergo some form of validation to ensure accuracy."
The detailed SNIA Green Storage Power Measurement specification including the Green Storage Taxonomy is available at: www.snia.org/tech_activities/publicreview.
To comment on the Green Storage Power Measurement specification, go to www.snia.org/feedback.
Additional resources, including SNIA's best practices, tutorials and other content to help users better understand and approach their green storage initiatives, could be found at www.snia.org/forums/green/knowledge. |
