Copan Pushes Power Savings

Storage vendors are cranking up their environmental activity, with a number of firms rushing to join the Green Grid initiative, and Copan readying a partnership with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). (See ColdWatt Joins Green Grid, 365 Main Joins Green Grid, Copan Joins Green Grid, and Green With Envy.)

Copan's deal, which will be announced on Monday, offers financial incentives to PG&E customers that buy MAID storage gear from Copan. The storage vendor claims that MAID offers higher density and lower power consumption than Fibre Channel. (See Copan Validates MAID, Copan Signs DDS, and US Navy.)

To review: The idea behind MAID, which stands for Massive Array of Idle Disks, is that the SATA drives used within the system can be powered up and down to save energy. (See Summer Storage Survival, Will New Head MAID Clean House?, and Copan Gets New MAID.) "Disks power up only when the request for the storage comes in," explains Copan CTO Aloke Guha.

PG&E uses an "energy calculator," which is based on an installation of Copan gear at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, to work out the cost savings. This is essentially an equation for working out the comparative power costs for MAID as opposed to, say, SATA storage, for a given customer's application. This takes into account factors such as direct energy and air conditioning costs.

One joint Copan/PG&E customer, a social networking Website, is about to receive a $12,000 check from PG&E after buying a 448-Tbyte MAID system from Copan. "We call this an incentive program and not a rebate program because the customer needs to apply before they purchase the equipment," says Mark Bramfitt, principal manager for PG&E's high tech business.The exec told Byte and Switch that it is in PG&E's interests for users to streamline their energy usage. "It's more cost effective to do energy efficiency than it is to design and build power plants."

Calif. has wrestled with a number of power issues over the past few years, most recently the state's 2001 energy crisis, which saw local users suffer rolling blackouts and high energy prices.

PG&E already offers financial incentives in areas such as virtualization and server consolidation, although Bramfitt says that the firm is also in discussion with other storage vendors. "I haven't talked to anyone else that has MAID storage, but I have talked to another company that has a strategy of running disks at lower speeds."

The exec adds that PG&E has also been approached by a vendor that provides storage for traditional server hardware.

At least one analyst told Byte and Switch that it would make good sense for other storage vendors to team up with energy companies in deals like this. "Storage is a looming power problem, particularly as firms get ready to store fixed and digital content for decades," says Rick Villars, vice president of storage systems at IDC.A prime candidate for this type of offering could be Fujitsu, which offers a technology for "spinning down" disks, although Villars warns that there is much more to power efficiency than just storage. "I dont think that any one technology, whether it's MAID, blades, or lower-cost chips, alone solves companies' energy problems."

CIOs need to take a much broader approach to their data center power challenges, warns the analyst, adding that air conditioning is typically the biggest consumer of electricity in data centers.

PG&E's partner companies, San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, are also offering the MAID-based financial incentives, and Bramfitt predicts that other utilities across the U.S. may follow suit.

Copan also joined the Green Grid initiative this week, a consortium of companies, including EMC, that are developing standards and processes to improve data center power efficiency. (See Time to Turn Green and Green Grid Addresses Efficiency.)

— James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch