SNIA's Green Storage Initiative Marks Continued Momentum

The 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.

This work has continued its momentum over the past year, as the SNIA GSI has actively engaged with the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) ENERGY STAR Program on development of an ENERGY STAR Data Center Storage Specification. Having submitted 31 datasets to the EPA for their data collection project, the SNIA 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 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

Additional GSI momentum has included:

• Technical Development: The Capacity Optimization subgroup of the SNIA Green Storage 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.
• Creating a Common Language and Definitions: The GSI and the SNIA Green Storage 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 Academy in EMEA and Singapore. 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.
• International Alliances: Globally, SNIA Europe and SNIA Japan have formed regional alliances with The Green Grid, complementing the SNIA USA alliance. The SNIA is now recognized as an Endorser of the European Union Code of Conduct on Data Centers for Energy Efficiency.

The GSI notes with great sadness the passing of Tom Clark, a former chairman of the GSI and a long-time advocate for Green IT best practices. Tom's webcast on "Green Storage" may be viewed on the SNIA website.