The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced the availability for public review and comment its initial Green Storage Initiative (GSI) Green Storage Power Measurement Specification.
The initial 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 organisations, and global governmental agencies, measure and shape the energy and power efficiency of storage systems,” said Leah Schoeb, chair 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.
SNIA’s Green Storage Initiative (GSI) is said to be dedicated to advancing energy efficiency and conservation in all networked storage technologies in an effort to minimise the environmental impact of data storage operations.
“There are many technologies on the market today that allow organisations to better manage their storage environments and reduce their power and cooling requirements and in EMEA as in the rest of the world, SNIA supports local government initiatives around energy savings,” said Juergen Arnold, SNIA Europe chairman and European liaison to SNIA Green Storage Initiative.
“Increased economic and societal pressures provide opportunity for organisations to lower their overall energy usage footprints,” said Mark Monroe, director of The Green Grid. “We support the SNIA’s efforts to help drive innovation around the development of energy efficient data storage products.”
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 5 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.
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Throughout 2009, SNIA’s GSI intends to expand the Green Storage Power Measurement Specification to include development of standardised active power measurement guidelines and metrics, standardised storage system power supply efficiency specifications as well as promotion and publication of each vendor’s completed test metrics.
The detailed SNIA Green Storage Power Measurement Specification including the Green Storage Taxonomy can be found at: www.snia.org/tech_activities/publicreview/
