Winner o’ the green
by David Merrill on Oct 15, 2010
I was reading a Wikibon entry today about the new IBM array, SSD, 2.5 inch SAS drives etc. and was pleasantly surprised to see a comparison chart showing power, cooling and space costs of the new Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) array, the Hitachi USP, EMC VMAX and of course the IBM 8800. Frankly, I was surprised to see a 3-year $200-700K savings favoring HDS so prominently displayed in an article reviewing the technical features of the IBM 8800.
The graphics and data speak for itself.
(Wikibon)
When we look at storage TCO, it is typical to have the environmental costs (power, cooling, floor space) represent about 15% of the total. Looking at these systems from EMC, HDS and IBM, and the differences on this view alone, it would present a 5-9% point spread between the Hitachi VSP and the other solutions.
Now, this data is for 100% SAS drives, using all 2.5 inch drives, and that may not be practical in many environments (we are seeing a good mix of SSD and SATA drives within the Hitachi VSP), but it does start to tell a story about looking at the environmental cost savings over time between different architectures and virtualization platforms.
I am currently researching the carbon emissions required to manufacture a fully populated Hitachi VSP array (including shipping and delivery to the dock), and will report back on that as soon as I get the data. It would be interesting to see the manufacturing carbon footprint of competing systems BEFORE they are ever plugged in and used in production.
