HP promises greener storage

New technology claims to cuts storage array power and cooling costs in half

Ian Williams, vnunet.com 22 Jun 2007

HP has introduced environmentally friendly storage technology which it claims can cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centres by 50 per cent.

The new Adaptive Infrastructure products were unveiled at the HP Americas StorageWorks Conference in Las Vegas.

HP is claiming to offer a range of enhancements for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array family, along with tape drives based on the Linear Tape Open 4 standard and new DAT 160 tape drives for small and medium businesses.

The company also released the first HP StorageWorks tape product developed exclusively for HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures.

Analyst firm StorageIO Group said recently that storage currently accounts for up to 40 per cent of overall data centre energy usage from hardware.

With the new HP storage products, a customer with a monthly storage electricity bill of $3,000 could save as much as $18,000 a year in power and cooling costs, according to HP.

"Power and cooling is a key enabler for an adaptive infrastructure, and these environmentally responsible products will help address two key areas: saving money and conserving energy," said Dave Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of the StorageWorks division at HP.

The HP StorageWorks EVA 4100, 6100 and 8100 midrange disk arrays improve power efficiency for customers by up to 45 per cent compared to previous EVAs, offering claimed performance improvements of up to 24 per cent.

Tony Asaro, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "We did a study in 2006 that found that 55 per cent of end users we surveyed left between 30 and 50 per cent of their storage capacity stranded."

Similar to thin provisioning, HP's new Dynamic Capacity Management software enables customers to double capacity utilisation rates and delay the purchase of additional hard drives.

Using the new virtual disk service volume shrink feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Dynamic Capacity Management continuously monitors storage utilisation rates and automatically increases or decreases host volumes to match application data needs.

This reduces the necessity for ongoing storage administration and practically eliminates stranded storage.

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