Cutting storage power requirements

Stephen Withers
Friday, 11 February 2011 16:43

Electricity is getting increasingly expensive in many regions, and some data centres are already drawing all the power available at their location. Here's what one vendor is doing to decrease the power draw per terabyte.

Australian electricity prices are slated to rise substantially over the next few years, and many data centres are already constrained by the power available from the substation(s) serving them, said Adrian De Luca, director, pre-sales and solutions at HDS Australia and New Zealand.

HDS's latest storage units use around half as much power as their predecessors, he said, and can run on a single-phase supply rather than the three-phase needed by older units.

Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer at Hitachi Data Systems, told iTWire that two main changes had led to the reduction in power consumption.

Firstly, the change from 3.5in to 2.5in disks has given an immediate 50% saving because less work needs to be done to spin the smaller and lighter platters.

Secondly, there has been a change in the way the drives are packaged. The previous practice was to mount a row of drives in a tray with cooling fans behind them. The new designs place drives at the front and back of the tray, and mount inlet and exhaust fans on the cabinet doors.

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