Storage Goes Green With Utilities Deal

Industry group Wikibon is bringing the utility and storage industries together in an attempt to drive down users spiraling energy costs.

The "Conserve IT" initiative, launched today, brings together seven storage vendors, including EMC and HDS, as well as California utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which has started offering rebates for customers deploying energy-efficient storage hardware.

“The IT industry doesn’t speak kilowatts, and the utility industry doesn’t speak geek,” explains Dave Vellante, Wikibon’s co-founder and principal contributor. “They need a translator, and that’s where we come in.”

The first step for Wikibon is to take the storage vendors’ offerings in areas such as MAID, thin provisioning, and virtualization, and calculate their eco-efficiency.

”We’re using measurements within the vendors’ labs that we evaluate,” says Vellante. “We use this to create a methodology to validate that these technologies are energy-efficient relative to a baseline.”This "baseline" could be, for example, an equivalent array without spin-down, thin provisioning, or Flash memory.

”Basically, what we have to demonstrate to the utility is that the technologies being offered by these vendors are more efficient than the average storage technology,” says the Wikibon exec.

Wikibon’s research suggests that storage accounts for anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of the energy consumed in data centers, hence the group's decision to act as matchmaker for storage vendors and utility firms.

The full list of vendors signed up for Conserve IT is EMC, HDS, Compellent, DataDirect, Xiotech, NexSan, and 3PAR, which is the first to announce a rebate scheme with PG&E.

Technologies that are likely to come under Wikibon’s scrutiny are HDS’s thin provisioning, EMC’s Flash SSD offerings, Nexsan’s AutoMAID, and Xiotech’s ISE hardware, which was launched in a blaze of publicity earlier this year.The notion of offering users an energy rebate based on their green storage credentials is still very much in its infancy, although EMC et al are following in the footsteps of MAID vendor Copan, which forged a partnership with PG&E last year. There are, however, very few publicly announced customers that have benefited from these rebates.

“We noticed that not enough customers were taking advantage of these rebates, in large part because not enough technologies were qualified,” explains Vellante. “We launched Conserve IT as a way to accelerate the qualification of vendor technologies within these types of rebate programs.”

Wikibon expects to see rebate deals emerge from Conserve IT within the next three to six months, and Vellante is already in discussions with other utilities.

“We have begun to have discussions in earnest outside of PG&E’s territory, in other parts of California, in Texas, on the East Coast, and even outside of the U.S. in Canada,” he says, explaining that other storage vendors are also likely to join Conserve IT by early 2009.

The exec admits that most of the work of Conserve IT relates to spinning disks, which consume up to 80 percent of the power in a typical array, but at least one vendor says that green disk technologies such as "power-down" have not exactly fired the imagination of end-users.In a Q&A with Byte and Switch HDS CTO Hu Yoshida said that uptake of the vendor’s power-down disk offerings has been slow, due partly to the additional planning and management often required for the technology.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.