Apologies for the delay between posts, it’s been a busy summer for all! Blogging back into the swing of things, I want to highlight an important milestone in Hitachi’s efforts to execute on green IT initiatives, and that’s the opening of one of the world’s most power efficient and technologically advanced data centers, the Yokohama Third Data Center. more
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As I mentioned in a previous post, the ENERGY STAR specification effort for storage products was initiated fairly recently and continues to move forward. Later this month there will be a meeting between the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to discuss the current specification and suggested modifications. One of the bigger issues that I see in the current spec as outlined is the continued focus on hardware (particularly spinning disk, controllers, networking devices, etc). Although appropriate, there appears to be an inadequate focus on the software technologies that can significantly reduce the reliance on the aforementioned power consuming hardware. This is particularly relevant to the storage segment of the data center as storage virtualization software, thin provisioning and de-duplication (as well as RAID level) have emerged. The Wikibon guys appear to agree, along with other vendors, so hopefully the user community out there will continue to push this discussion. I say this not for selfish Hitachi reasons (because the company has plenty of green innovations on the hardware side), but the simple fact that the EPA would be missing a major element of the mix by excluding power and space reducing software technologies.
Remember that hilarious scene from Spinal Tap when Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) innocently and ignorantly insists his guitar amplifier is better than the rest because it “goes up to eleven” on the volume dial. Of course, he misses the point in that its supposed to be about the music that the amplifier helps to produce, and that anyone can simply recalibrate the dials to make theirs “go up to eleven” as well.
At least that’s what EMC and Joe Tucci gave us today at the keynote to their annual soiree in Orlando this week. With all the fanfare associated with these types of things, he gives us, “SSDs”, that’s what’s “hot in storage right now”. Yes, we sort of knew that already and that the economics of flash disk are changing. (That’s why Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) and Intel announced a joint development agreement last year with plans to offer enterprise class products soon). Gosh, any other pearls of wisdom for the gathered masses? How about, “Everything we (EMC) do, we approach with a green thumb”. We have not quite heard it mentioned in those terms before, so I suppose that could be construed as something new. The problem I have with that statement is that everything EMC does from a storage perspective is centered on proliferating islands of infrastructure and making data migration and provisioning across heterogeneous environments difficult, if not impossible.
I just wanted to note something that you may not have seen recently. The US Environmental Protection Agency has initiated an effort to develop an “ENERGY STAR” specification for computer storage equipment. This is the same method used to label household appliances as ENERGY STAR compliant. It basically means that the appliance is deemed energy efficient according to the specifications outlined by the EPA, and intended to be used as a guide by consumers when purchasing.
EMC announced another upgrade to its homongeneous proprietary single frame architecture this week. Its been a couple of years, seems about right. Claiming its the next great thing in storage and……gasp…..virtualization. Did they say virtualization, really? I didn’t realize that their new definition of storage virtualization only applies to disk sitting inside the box! Customers’ willingness to buy into this will certainly test the limits of EMC’s sales machine.
Making my way to Orlando on Monday to meet some of our customers and also check-in on what’s happening in the storage vendor world. I’m curious to see what’s happening with the power measurement spec being developed by SNIA. Perhaps some real progress or simply more industry vendor gyrations, hopefully the former.
I watched the recent Bond film Quantum of Solace recently (which was fantastic btw) and it got me thinking about water supply (this was rather relevant to the plot, but I won’t give it away). Yes clean water, rapidly developing into *the* new coveted commodity.
I spent a few days in the UK last week and chatted with my colleague Alec Selvon-Bruce, our company’s European champion for all things eco-efficient. He’s one of the most well-versed people I know when I comes to this stuff. Below is an excerpt from a short Q&A we conducted.
In these unprecedented economic times, doesn’t it make sense to do a better job taking advantage of existing storage assets that could be sitting there wasting expensive space, power and cooling? Of course when making net-new storage purchases it is prudent to buy the most power and space efficient technology available, but why even go there when it’s not necessary? The reason I bring this up is that very recently Hitachi Data Systems helped a major customer do just that – avoid paying millions of dollars for additional capacity. Let’s call them “MegaCorp” for now since this particular scenario literally just took place.
