SNIA unveils green storage power measurement spec

Staff Writers
Thursday, 29 January 2009 05:42

Storage industry peak body, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has unveiled its initial Green Storage Initiative (GSI) Green Storage Power Measurement Specification for public review and comment.

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.

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.

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.

"This initial release of the Green Storage Power Measurement Specification is an important step forward in driving the storage industry towards standardised measurement of the energy and power efficiency of storage systems," said Craig Scroggie, Symantec Pacific region managing director and chair of SNIA ANZ.

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.