Green Storage

SNIA Green Storage Initiative Unveils SNIA Emerald™ Power Efficiency Measurement Specification and SNIA Emerald Program

Learn about the Emerald™ program 

Technical Developments

The Capacity Optimization subgroup of the SNIA Green Technical Work Group (TWG) has developed heuristics for determining whether systems are using capacity optimizing technologies such as delta snapshots, thin provisioning, advanced RAID, data deduplication and compression. These heuristics will be contributed as input to the EPA ENERGY STAR Storage Specification in the near future.

About the SNIA Green Storage Initiative

SNIA’s Green Storage Initiative (GSI) is dedicated to advancing energy efficiency and conservation in all networked storage technologies in an effort to minimize the environmental impact of data storage operations. SNIA’s Green Storage activities take place in two separate working bodies, the SNIA Green Storage Technical Working Group (TWG) and the Green Storage Initiative. The TWG is focused on developing test metrics by which energy consumption and efficiency can be measured. The Green Storage Initiative is focused on creating and publicizing best practices for energy efficient storage networking, educating the IT community, and promoting storage–centric applications that reduce storage footprint and associated power requirements. The members of the GSI, as of October 2011, include EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, LSI, Oracle, NetApp, Q-logic, Seagate, VMware, and Xyratex. Clcik here for more information about SNIA’s Green Storage Initiative.

Green Storage Power Measurement Technical Specification v0.0.18 DRAFT

The initial draft Green Storage Power Measurement Specification defines a baseline standard for idle power metrics which can be applied as a uniform method for collecting idle power consumption measurements. It also includes a “Green Storage Taxonomy” for classifying storage products based on energy consumption characteristics and application environments. 

  SNIA Green Storage Power Measurement Technical Specification - Working Draft Version 0.0.18

Creating a Common Language and Definitions

The GSI and the SNIA Green TWG have contributed terminology to the SNIA Dictionary. New terms include Effective Capacity and Storage Efficiency, which can be used to describe the amount of data that can be stored in a system with a given raw capacity.

These terms are also shared with the EPA for the terminology sections of their planned ENERGY STAR Data Center Storage Specification.

Education and Training

The GSI has continued to educate IT professionals and data center managers on Green Storage issues via SNIA tutorials and presentations at worldwide events.

These include SNW and the Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the USA, and SNW and the SNIA Europe Academies. Other events included INTEROP, both in New York and Las Vegas, Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) in San Francisco, Data Storage Expo in Tokyo, Green Data Center Conference in San Diego, as well as interviews and webcasts. View SDC presentations