Users Search for Green Storage

Subterranean data centers, MAID, and the power benefits of North Carolina were all high on the agenda at SNW this week as users and vendors described their many different approaches to green IT.

Most of our green initiatives started with cost savings -- it really is just another form of green,” quipped Ed Goldman, vice president of technology strategy at Marriott International, during a keynote on Wednesday.

Marriott nonetheless aims to reduce its carbon emissions by a million tons by 2010, and the exec is constantly looking for new ways to reduce the cost of powering his servers and storage.

”We’re working with all our different vendors to reduce the power requirements of what they use,” said Goldman, adding that he has already reduced the firm’s server count by a third through virtualization.

The exec is also prepared to go to fairly unusual lengths to keep his cooling costs under control.“We found an interesting third party that locates their recovery center 150 feet underground in a Pennsylvania mine,” he said, explaining that the subterranean data center is easier to cool than a traditional outdoor facility because its temperature is constantly between 50 and 60 degrees.

”When we open this in the August timeframe, we expect it to be LEED certified,” added Goldman, referring to the environmental standard that is increasingly being applied to data centers.

It is not just users facing major power and cooling dilemmas, as evidenced by a major new data center that Sunnyvale, Calif.-based NetApp is building in Cary, N.C.

”Clearly, we can’t stop expanding in California, but we’re trying to push some of our expansion to Research Triangle Park, Carolina, to some extent to Boston, and to Bangalore,” said Tom Georgens, the NetApp CEO, during a lunch with journalists.

”Electricity is much cheaper than in California -- from what I understand, it’s a third [of the price],” he noted, explaining that the $60 million Cary data center will contain a football-field’s worth of server, storage, and networking gear.NetApp’s global support organization is already located in Cary, and Georgens feels that it makes sense to split much of the firm’s technology work between California and the Tar Heel State: “You can’t source for talent all in one place, we want to have an East Coast base and a West Coast base."

Another exec banging the green IT drum in Florida this week was Andy Monshaw, general manager of system storage at IBM. During a keynote speech, Monshaw announced that IBM is about to throw its weight behind Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID), a technology that keeps disks idle until times when they are needed.

”MAID technologies are becoming important in the infrastructure, turning disks on and off,” he said, during a keynote Wednesday, adding that energy costs are currently “out of control.”

The one obvious flaw in Monshaw’s argument was the fact that IBM does not actually have any MAID offerings at the moment, although this is about to change.

“We do think that the technology is real, and we have deployment plans on the technology,” he said, in response to a question from Byte and Switch, but he did not reveal when this would be available.More and more mainstream storage vendors are currently jumping on the MAID bandwagon, joining early movers Copan, NexSan, Fujitsu, and NEC. Other firms, such as HDS and Xyratex, have developed their own disk-based energy-saving technologies, and EMC revealed plans to move into MAID at its analyst day last October.

With more attention now being focused on MAID, Copan’s CEO Mark Ward told Byte and Switch that his firm will also be improving its own offerings over the coming months. “There will be additional enhancement to our MAID OS,” he told Byte and Switch. “We will be announcing power-managed partitioning -- the ability to split LUNs."

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