Around the Storage Block Blog : green storage

Green Storage – the view from Vienna

DGarrels — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:20:00 GMT

By David Garrels

Ok, this entry won't have very much to do with Green Storage. But I had the opportunity to attend the SIBOS tradeshow in Vienna a ~week ago and thought I'd share some observations about the show and about "green" in general (SIBOS is a Banking show focused on Payment system & tools and HP was there talking about our products & services in that space).

First the show: it was good to be at a very industry-specific event that drilled down on the real pain points of that industry. A lot different than a technology show where it's all about feeds, speeds, and features. We had great conversations with customers about how we can help them with the storage infrastructure supporing their payments systems. The interesting thing, however, was the timing - it was the first of the announcements we've seen in the last week about the banking/credit "crisis" and there were lots of distractions for the conference attendees. Certainly that was the talk of the week and we heard that many of the attendees ended up leaving early.

A few thoughts on Green: At the end of the day, I'm disappointed that not much has changed to make travel & conferences more Green. The airline I was on didn't separate items (plastic cups, etc) to recycle. The convention center had minimal recycling opportunities. Vendors and publications still print lots of handouts (HP had only a few copies of a 4-page brochure, the rest was all available online or via cd). Still too many cars, taxis, and buses driving around (although great subway/trains in Vienna that make it easy to get around). The hotel did the standard "we won't wash your towels every night", but not much beyond that - no recycling bin in the room for water bottles, etc. I'm sure there are conventions that do more, but I think in general we have a long way to go.

The Real Story on tape storage

jim hankins — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:26:00 GMT

The Real Story on tape storage

Green Storage #5 – Drive type and speed choices affect your power requirements

DGarrels — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:08:00 GMT

- by David Garrels

We're working on updating our power calculator tools so that when you're considering HP disk arrays, you can identify the power trade-offs of selecting different drive types. Of course, which drive type you choose depends on a lot of different factors - access time requirements, file/block size needs, etc. and your solution architect or channel partner can help you through that. But power draw is something you should also consider.

In general, slower spinning drives use less power. For example**, a 400GB 10K RPM drive pulls ~8 watts while spinning idle. A 450GB 15K RPM drive pulls ~12 watts. That's a significant difference that gets multiplied over the number of drives in the cabinet. An EVA4400 fully loaded with the 10K drive uses ~770 watts for drive power while the same EVA full of 15K drives will use ~1100 watts.

Again, you need to build the system that will support your application and enable your business goals. As part of that, you may want to consider the power requirements of the drives you select.

We'd be interested in your feedback - is power draw something you think about when configuring your systems?

**Note: all power measures are estimates and reference drive power only. Controllers, fans, etc also consume power and need to be calculated in the overall system requirements. Our updated power calculators on hp.com will include this.

Green Storage #4 – Your power saving strategy should include tape

DGarrels — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 03:08:00 GMT

- by David Garrels

We’ve talked in this blog before about how much power spinning disks use as being the biggest driver of storage power consumption. And we’ve discussed ways to minimize the number of spinning disks. Now, let’s talk about how much power you can save if you get the data off of disk and on to tape.

Everyone wants to keep every bit of information they create “in case they need it later”.    But with archive restrictions and requirements, and with the cost of electricity to keep multiple copies of data spinning on disk drives, there is a real opportunity to archive data off the primary array storage.

There are two primary options of where to archive data: disk (Virtual Tape Libs or Disk2Disk backup) or tape. There are trade-offs around time to recovery – it’s obviously quicker to pull data off disk. And there is a real opportunity for power savings if you archive to tape. In fact, the Clipper Group has compared tape and disk archiving and says tape archives have lifetime ownerships 23 times less and a near 290X energy advantage over archiving to disk.

Of course it’s a trade-off of access time and power savings, so you need to evaluate both. But anyone looking at a power saving project, should make sure to look at tape as an important and tangible way to reduce the power needed to store data.

The Clipper Group paper, “Disk and Tape Square Off Again – Tape Remains King of the Hill with LTO-4,” is available for download from http://www.ultrium.com/whitepapers. A companion webcast, hosted by Reine and Kahn, is available for archived viewing at www.ultrium.com. Take a look at it as part of your Green Storage project.

Green Storage #3 – Green Storage and SNIA Unplugged Fest

BlogArchive — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:24:00 GMT

Green Storage #3 – Green Storage and SNIA Unplugged Fest

- by David Garrels

You may have recently seen a recent announcement from SNIA that they were hosting an “unplugged” fest at their facility in Colorado Springs April 22- 23. HP and several other vendors came together to collect the baseline data needed to formulate the standards metrics for power consumption of storage products.

The first step in creating industry standard metrics for storage power consumption is understanding what to measure and how to measure it. And of course, having all vendors measure the same things the same ways. So SNIA hosted an event where the technical teams several vendors could come to the SNIA site and put their systems through the paces.

Each vendor brought a few of their key products (HP brought both disk arrays and tape libraries) and hooked them up to monitored Power Distribution Units (PDU’s) which provided real-time data of the power usage. Systems were tested both in Idle mode and in Peak Performance mode. The data collected from the PDU will be analyzed and used for the next step, which is to determine what common measures can be set by capacity, class of array/library, etc.

One interesting side note – as you might expect when this many products from different vendors are brought together quickly, there were a few minor glitches. Power connections, network configurations and other small issues would come up during the testing. But in the spirit of industry collaboration (and the importance of the work around power metrics & usage), everyone pulled together to get the problems resolved -- good collaboration amongst the different vendors.

We’re putting a lot of work into minimizing the power our storage systems use, and like to hear your feedback on the value of power management and metrics in your data center.

Green Storage #2 – Minimizing Environmental Impact

BlogArchive — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:43:00 GMT

- by David Garrels

Last time in the Green Storage blog we talked about ways to minimize the power requirements of storage and the three tools you can use today to save power. Now, let’s look at some of the things we’re doing at HP to minimize the environmental impact of our products themselves.

We’ve got Product Stewardship teams from each of our product groups looking at many different environmental aspects of our storage products. The main areas are:

Materials Innovation:

Materials innovation at HP means reducing the environmental impact of materials we use for our storage products. We’re looking at three main areas:

1. Materials substitution and elimination. There are still some materials used in computer manufacturing that not very recyclable, including Brominated Flame Retardants (BFRs) and PVCs. We have plans to replace these as soon as possible across the product line.

2. Reduction of materials quantity. We continually look at ways to reduce the amount of material it takes to produce, pack, and ship our products.

3. Innovative and recycled materials. HP is constantly increasing the amount of post-consumer recycled content used in packaging materials and other product design elements.

Product Recycleability & Manufacturing methods:

Our product stewardship teams are also looking at every low-level part in every product with a goal to drive to zero waste, meaning product can be disassembled to the point where every element can be isolated and recycled.

We also take great care that products destined for recycling under our control really gets recycled. There have been some recent press articles about consumer recycling programs where the material just end up in landfills and we strive to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Product End of Life:

HP offers several choices to manage aging or unwanted computing equipment while also minimizing the impact on the environment. Customers can choose to trade in, return for cash, recycle, or donate their equipment.

Low-impact Distribution methods:

We’re even looking at the ways we ship our product around the world – at how we can achieve our business goals of customer delivery times, and at the same time minimize the carbon-dioxide per unit generated in the shipping process. We do this by balancing the mix of air, sea, and ground methods to optimize delivery and minimize CO2 impact.

So – we’re doing a lot at the product level to make sure our storage products have minimal environmental impact. We'd like to hear your thoughts on environmental impact with your computing equipment & data center operations.

“Green” Storage – use it to solve real business problems

BlogArchive — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:58:00 GMT

- by David Garrels

There’s a lot of “greenwashing” going on in the IT world today – vendors talking about their “green IT” strategy in so many different ways it becomes very confusing (buy a pc, plant a tree?). I’ve even seen vendors show up at tradeshows having changed their company logo & booth color to green, just to show how green they really are.

Interesting, but I think “green IT” is first and foremost about getting your business done – and then applying “green” concepts to drive better business outcomes AND better environmental outcomes.

Energy costs are going up (it’s generally accepted that you’ll spend three times as much on powering and cooling your IT hardware over its life as you do acquiring it). Systems are getting more dense and requiring more power. Data centers are “out of power” – i.e. they couldn’t get more power into their data center if they wanted to. And the demands for IT compute and storage resources show no signs of slowing down. These are business problems we can help solve them with green solutions.

After Cooling and Servers, Storage is the #3 power draw in a typical data center. The biggest “culprits” in an array are the spinning drives, whether they’re empty or full, whether they’re idle or busy. And there are three key tools/techniques you can use today to minimize the number of drives in your systems:

#1 – Thin Provisioning/Dynamic Capacity Management. This basically allows you to configure your system to the amount/size of data you’ll need in the future, but only install the number of physical drives that you need now (add more drives when you need them without re-configuring your systems). We’ve seen 40-45% power savings in some cases

#2 – Using “big” drives with storage tiering. A 500GB drive uses about the same power as a 146GB drive (but holds ~70% more). Setting up a disk group with “big” drives to hold data like client pc files can yield a 50% power savings.

#3 – De-dup and Archive. Backing up the same data twice or keeping an “untouched” file spinning forever on disk is a waste of space and therefore power. Using the de-duplication in VLS libraries and archiving un-used data to tape can be between a 40% and 100% savings in power (no on-going power required to keep data on a tape!).

These three techniques are relatively simple things you can do today to save power in your data center. Saving power means either saving money or extending the life of your data center. Those are both better business outcomes that IT can drive. And “green”? Sure, because we all want to save energy and drive better environmental outcomes wherever we can.