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Tripping On Power: Page 9 of 14

In fact, according to Bob Wambach, senior product business manager at EMC, when it comes to trading off power usage for performance and reliability, the latter always wins. Though it's not specifically a power-saving initiative, Wambach sees EMC's Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy as one that will also result in power savings. "Our tier-2 storage systems can not only use much higher capacity SATA drives, but they also employ smaller caches and less I/O processing power," he explains. Though EMC offers SATA drives, it doesn't presently take advantage of the low-power operation modes typically available on them.

The storage industry is, on the other hand, investigating storage models that will use dramatically less power for some applications. Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) systems are now offered by Copan Systems and others. Billed as an alternative to tape backup, these systems store data on high-capacity SATA drives, then shut off the drives until the data is accessed. The technology is specifically intended to save costs in terms of power and the amount of controller circuitry required.

POWER GRAB

While CPU and drive-power management are important, they aren't the whole story. The wisdom of generations of fathers can be applied to the data center--namely, if you aren't using it, turn it off. Efforts such as IBM's Autonomic Computing initiative seek to better instrument both systems and applications. On the systems side, the emphasis is on performance monitoring, imminent failure assessment, and power management. On the software side, much of the focus is on event notification and management.