Like it or loathe it: The march toward green storage is moving
forward.
HP, Pillar Data Systems and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) all have
announced "green" storage products in recent weeks and the green
twist comes from the addition of thin
provisioning, which lets administrators earmark more capacity
than has been physically reserved on an array to delay storage
purchases until absolutely necessary.
Physical capacity is only dedicated when the application writes
data, rather than when the storage volume is initially allocated.
This means you don't have to keep a lot of spinning disks around
sucking up power and not actually being used.
HP announced its version of thin provisioning, dubbed Dynamic
Capacity Management (DCM), at its StorageWorks show in Las Vegas
this week. It also claimed its new LTO-4 Ultrium 1840 tape drive
consumes 50% fewer watts per gigabyte than previous versions.
Earlier in the week, Pillar Data, the storage startup founded by
Oracle chief Larry Ellison, unveiled its green storage initiative.
This includes the addition of 750 Gbyte
SATA drives to its Axiom array, increasing capacity within a
single system. Presumably, the greenness comes from fewer systems
and less power. Pillar said it will introduce support for thin
provisioning in the fall.
Pillar Data also come up with a green storage equation designed
to measure the efficiency of storage systems. It goes like this:
capacity (in gigabytes) multiplied by performance (in input/output
operations per second), divided by power consumption (in watts),
multiplied by space (in square meters). However, no one buying
storage has actually used the equation yet, so it's hard to know if
it's useful or not. Right now, it makes for great marketing fodder,
and that's about it.
Meanwhile, HDS and EqualLogic took the wraps off
thin-provisioning capabilities earlier this month, following
Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp), 3PARdata Inc. and Compellent. 3PAR
CEO David Scott was quick to blast his competitors' efforts,
calling them "chubby provisioning," meaning that they don't save as
much capacity as 3PAR. Watch out for more mudslinging as thin
provisioning takes off.
EMC has yet to throw its hat into the energy efficiency ring in
any meaningful way, but the company does have a "green committee"
dedicated to "solving this problem," according to a company
spokesperson. Hopefully, they won't spend too much time talking
about it instead of actually doing something. I heard a funny
comment at EMC World in Orlando last month. During the expo, the
lights dimmed at one point -- a tactic the organisers were using to
signal the end of the event. As the lights went down, someone
shouted out: "Did somebody just plug in a Symm!?" and the whole
place erupted in laughter. Not a good sign.
So far, all the green talk among storage vendors has done
nothing to address the needless voltage conversions and other
architectural flaws inside storage systems today that waste energy,
as explained in this story on
power efficiency. It'll be interesting to
see if anyone builds a storage array from scratch that's truly
designed for energy efficiency.