The first of these is the announcement of a new Storage Performance Council (SPC) benchmark for testing the power consumption of storage devices in the data center. The new SPC-1E spec follows the SPC-1 C/E spec announced in June. Where the SPC-1C/E spec covered storage components and small subsystems (limited to a maximum of 48 storage devices in no larger than a 4U enclosure profile), the SPC-1E spec expands that support to include larger, more complex storage configurations.

According to an SPC presentation on the new benchmark,  ”SPC-1/E is applicable to any SPC-1 storage
configuration that can be measured with a single SPC approved power meter/analyzer.”

For more on how the SPC-1C/E and SPC-1E benchmarks work, see our story on the SPC-1C/E announcement. Users should especially be aware of the parts of the benchmark calculation that can only be specified by vendors.

Still, even an approximate or idealized lab result for power consumption of storage systems would be an improvement over the tools avialable to reliably spec power consumption, increasingly a key cost factor for data centers that users in economically strapped times are looking to cut.

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Speaking of cutting costs, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) devices are widely regarded as the cheaper choice of the future to replace Fibre Channel systems. With 6 Gbps SAS products now beginning to ship, the SCSI Trade Association laid out its roadmap for the future of connectivity between Serial Attached SCSI drives and other elements of the infrastructure.

3 Gbps SAS devices connected via InfiniBand connectors; the Mini-SAS HD connector will be used with most 6 Gbps devices. The new roadmap laid out this week specifies that the Mini-SAS HD connector will be the hardware of choice going forward for all types of connectivity into SAS devices.

Why do you care? Because the development plans for the Mini-SAS HD connector going forward will allow it to serve optical, active and passive copper cables with one connector device, and automatically detect the type of cable it’s attached to — meaning that by the time 12 Gbps SAS rolls around, less hardware wil need to be ripped and replaced to support it. Another thing the connector will support in the future is managed connections, meaning a tiny bit of memory in the connector itself that allows the devices to be queried for reporting and monitoring.

The ability to connect SAS devices over optical and active copper cables is a pretty big deal — cable length and expandability limitations have improved significantly with SAS-2, but native cable lengths currently remain limited to 10 meters. While this is already making data center SAS subsystems a reality, it will need more robust connectivity attributes to compete directly with Fibre Channel. Optical cables can stretch as far as 100 meters, and active copper (so called because it contains transcievers that boost signals) to 20 meters.

Adaptec director of worldwide marketing Suresh Paniker said spin-down is already a part of the serial drive interface specs, so no API or special integration is required for Adaptec’s product to put drives into idle mode or power them off entirely. Sensitive data that may be unexpectedly accessed, such as registry information for Windows apps, can be kept on battery-backed cache within the controller.

The controller will set the rotation, and power draw, of the drives at three levels: normal, standby and power-off. The speed and power draw of the standby stage will vary by drive manufacturer, but generally drives on standby will require 7 to 10 seconds to return to normal operation and will draw between 5 and 7 watts per drive. Power-off requires 20 to 40 seconds for the disk drive to spin up, and though not spinning, the rest of the drive’s internal mechanisms will still draw about 3 watts of power.

The feature will be made available this week through distributors to resellers, OEMs and end users, along with new fields in the controllers’ software interface to manage spin-down policies. Getting the controller and other system parts from a distributor is a cheaper way of building your own storage system, and to some extent, the availability of this feature from Adaptec suggests MAID is going mainstream. But obviously, some assembly is required.

PG&E offers rebates for customers who use storage systems it has certified as energy-efficient. The utility started last year with Copan’s Revolution systems and last week qualified 3PAR’s InServ systems.

An initiative called Conserve IT revealed today by storage research group Wikibon and seven storage vendors looks to bring more vendors and more technologies into the PG&E program, as well as help other utilities offer similar programs. Wikibon is measuring the green-friendliness of technologies such as MAID, flash, thin provisioning and virtualization.

The first vendors to sign on are 3PAR, Compellent, DataDirect Networks, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Nexsan and Xiotech.

Wikibon founder and principal contributor David Vellante said his group will validate the baseline for energy efficiency, test products, write reports and submit them to PG&E.

“We bring in the last mile,” Vellante said. “We do the dirty work about really understanding why these products are more energy-efficient than some baseline. We determine where does that baseline come in and who measures this.”

Vellante said Wikibon is talking to utilities companies in Texas, California, New Jersey, Minnesota and Canada and he expects to add others to the list. Other technologies will likely be targeted too, such as data deduplication.

He said Wikibon and Conserve IT has no formal deal with PG&E, and vendors can qualify their technologies without its help. But the group has already helped 3PAR certify InServ. Vellante said along with storage companies, he is talking to software, server and communications firms. “We feel we can do this more quickly and efficiently than anybody right now, other than PG&E,” he said.

The program comes at the right time, as hype over green computing is being replaced by people actually looking to do something about it — even if it is more to save money than to save the environment in many cases.

(Photo courtesy 416style on Flickr)

Heard a story on the news yesterday and couldn’t help but wonder if it might have implications for green data centers. 

It was a report on green roofs, an emerging practice of placing a layer of soil on the flat roof of a building or house and then planting vegetation. It’s chiefly done to compensate for the effect of deforestation on air quality in cities, and to manage stormwater runoff more effectively in the concrete jungle.

But there’s another effect green roofs have, according to the report: the average flat roof can climb to between 150 and 200 degrees in summer months, exposed as it is under the hot sun. A green roof can bring that temperature down to the vicinity of 80 or 90 degrees, alleviating some of the stress on the building’s air-conditioning system and burning less energy to cool it.

I’m sure I don’t have to explain the implications of this for helping to cool data centers, provided they’re in the right location. As it turns out, it would seem there are at least a few people out there who got that idea as well.