SNIA Emerald Program
SNIA Green Storage Initiative Unveils SNIA Emerald™ Power Efficiency Measurement Specification and SNIA Emerald Program
Result of a Three-Year Technical Effort Establishes Industry Baseline for Storage System Energy Usage Reports
The SNIA’s Green Storage Initiative (GSI) announces the release of the SNIA Emerald™ programme and the availability of the SNIA Emerald™ Power Efficiency Measurement Specification, which was developed collaboratively among more than 25 member companies. The SNIA Emerald™ specification provides a vendor-neutral power efficiency test measurement set of methods and the SNIA Emerald™ Program provides an industry-wide repository of measured test data.
"The SNIA is proud to deliver the SNIA Emerald™ programme to a global IT industry and national bodies concerned with energy efficiency," said Leah Schoeb, chair of the SNIA Green Storage Initiative. "We are providing end-users and the industry at-large with a means to test, measure and evaluate storage system power usage and efficiency at a time when datacenter energy usage is projected to increase by 19% in 2012 according to Data Center Dynamics 2011 Census Report.”
Download the full spec: SNIA Emerald Power Efficiency Measurement Spec v1.0
The SNIA Emerald™ programme provides a vendor neutral way of determining energy efficiency in the storage networking system and a location for determining peak and average power usage that can be used to determine facility costs. The SNIA Emerald™ programme process requires the submission of testing results and also requires basic power ratings to be included beyond just testing. This information, in a standardized format, will then be made available to anyone needing this information without having to sift through the literature and manuals of multiple storage networking industry vendors.
This programme is targeted at multiple audiences: the storage networking industry, companies evaluating the energy efficiency of storage networking systems as a component of their purchase strategy, facility managers looking for help in determining power requirements for their datacenters, the press, analysts and others.
What It Contains
The SNIA Emerald™ Power Efficiency Measurement Specification consists of the following elements:
- Taxonomy: An industry-wide means of segmenting storage systems for products that span the range from consumer solutions to enterprise configurations that will be used to categorize the test results.
- Test Methodology: A detailed and consistent means of testing various types of storage systems with load generators and power measurement instruments.
- Test Metrics - Idle Measurement Test: The idle test applies to storage systems and components which are configured, powered up, connected to one or more hosts and capable of satisfying externally initiated, application-level initiated IO requests within normal response time constraints, but no such IO requests are being submitted.
- Test Metrics - Active Measurement Test: Testing of storage products and components are said to be in an “active” state when they are processing externally initiated, application-level requests for data transfer between host(s) and the storage product(s).
To learn more about the SNIA Emerald programme, visit www.SNIAEmerald.com
