EMC plays hard disk green card
EMC plays hard disk green card
"Symmetrix DMX-4 is the most energy efficient enterprise storage array in the world, using up to 70 percent less power than competitive offerings," EMC said. And "By placing the right data on the right type of disk drive to meet service levels, customers can reduce the amount of power it takes to store a terabyte of information by up to 91 percent."
We don’t know how this is achieved but it sounds like something that is not unique to EMC.
What are the factors that determine how much energy an HDD uses? Number of platters? How full it is? How fast it spins?
If you are really feeling green the company says: “The new Centera Generation 4 LP (Low Power) nodes were specifically designed by EMC with low-power processors and chipsets, adaptive cooling and more efficient power supplies to reduce energy consumption while also offering 50 percent more storage capacity per node using new 750 GB SATA disk drives. The result: A Generation 4 LP node reduces power and cooling requirements by 67 percent per terabyte.” Which sounds impressive.
Power consumption concerns in computer systems is not new. This is from here www.link and is dated from 1994: “Recently, a large effort has been made to reduce the power consumed by computer-systems. Multiple power states have been defined, and mechanisms have been developed to allow system software to control transitions between these states. Unfortunately, little work has been done to determine effective times to change states. Statistical models of the power utilized by individual subsystems call provide a basis for making such decisions. The hard disk state model described provides both the quantitative data and insight necessary to design an efficient power management system.”
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