Adaptec Goes Green With 'Spin Down' Controllers

Adaptec launched a "Green Power" initiative today by adding the ability to spin down hard disk drives to conserve power to its Series 5 and Series 2 RAID controllers. The company says its Intelligent Power Management capability can cut storage power consumption by as much as 70 percent without degrading application performance.

The vendor describes its power management system, which is being added to the controllers at no extra charge, as compatible with 122 disk drives from five storage vendors. Adaptec says it has been shown to cut power use on a Seagate Barracuda ES SATA drive by as much as 70 percent and reduce power usage on a Hitachi Ultrastar SAS drive by up to 73 percent.

The spin-down feature is especially effective for applications that experience large blocks of idle time, including email archiving, disk-to-disk backup, virtual tape libraries, file transfer services, and file and print servers, says Suresh Panikar, director of worldwide marketing at Adaptec.

"Some applications spend up to 75 percent to 90 percent of their time idle, where there is no activity," he says. "It presents an opportunity to reduce power and cooling costs."

The challenge, Panikar told Byte and Switch, was to develop technology that took into account the demands of operating systems and applications. "Operating systems and databases are writing to storage all the time and you have to take that into consideration. They don't stop sending information," he says. "So we had to use cache with battery backup so the OS didn't know we had spun down the disks. When the cache is full, we bring a disk back up to speed, write data from cache, and then spin it back down."He called storage "one of the most energy-intensive components in any computing system" and said the new technology has the potential for significant energy and cost savings. More than 50 million disk drives are working in external storage arrays worldwide and more than $1.3 billion is spent annually to power and cool those drives, according to research firm IDC.

As data centers get crowded with equipment that consumes large amount of energy, generate a lot of heat, and require huge cooling systems, tech vendors have been working to become more "green" by making their gear more energy efficient. Virtual Iron, for example, is adding features to its software that will move virtual servers off of underutilized machines, which can then be powered down. And virtualization specialist 3PAR has joined forces with utility Pacific Gas & Electric to launch a storage rebate program. For storage, one approach has been spinning down idle disks. That tactic has been pushed by Copan Systems, with its Enterprise MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) products.

But developing computing and storage systems that consume less power while still delivering high performance isn't easy, according to a new report from Forrester Research. "Technology is not green, and never will be," explains Forrester analyst Doug Washburn in the report "Is Green IT Your Emperor With No Clothes?," arguing that users, not vendors, will drive the green agenda forward.

Data center managers to date have been focusing on the power used by and heat generated by servers, but they will begin to look more at storage systems, says Greg Quick, a storage and systems analyst at research firm The 451 Group. "There are real-world savings to be obtained from what Adaptec is doing, and the market is looking for solutions. Hard disk drive companies know they face a challenge because solid-state drives are so much more efficient."

Quick calls Adaptec's technology "a really good first step," but says hard drive makers and applications developers need to work together to make systems that use less energy while still delivering good performance. "This is only for specific drives for specific applications," he says. "Some people will always want 100 percent access to some applications."Eventually, such power-savings technology "will become mandatory," Quick says. "There are data centers on Wall Street that are power constrained. They have all the power they are ever going to get. They have to take power [usage] out of their current equipment if they want to add more CPUs."

Adaptec's power management system lets drives run at three different levels: full power, standby power running at lower speeds during idle period, and power-off mode, where the disks are not spinning. Users can set up drives to spin up and down and operate at different levels automatically. "It is fully automated and customer configurable. You can put policies in place to manage all of that," says Panikar.

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