Latest Developments in SNIA Green Storage Initiative
SNIA Green Storage Initiative

International Alliances and Colloboration on Green Storage

SNIA Europe is now recognized as an Endorser of the European Union Code of Conduct for Data Centres.

SNIA US has actively engaged with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the past year on development of an ENERGY STAR Data Center Storage Specification. The SNIA has submitted 31 datasets to the EPA for their data collection project and continues to work closely with the EPA to ensure efforts, initiatives and industry resources are complementary for users. Several member companies use the SNIA as a way to anonymously submit data to the EPA. The SNIA has also shared test data with the EPA for validating power supply efficiency measurement methods, a joint project with Climate Savers Computing Initiative and Ecos and the 80 PLUS® program with work performed by EPRI.

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.

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.

http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/publicreview/GreenPower_v018.pdf

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. The SNIA Tutorials are available at: www.snia-europe.org/education/tutorials. SDC presentations are available at:www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations.

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