Xyratex Scales Down for Green Storage

Xyratex is banging its green storage drum again, unveiling a scaled-down, low-energy version of its OneStor hardware.

The 3.5-Tbyte SP1224s is Xyratexs first offering to use 2.5-inch drives, which the vendor is aiming at applications requiring high input/output operations per second (IOPS). By packing 24 2.5-inch drives into a 2U form factor, Xyratex claims to offer double the performance density of its predecessor, the 4U, 24-Tbyte SP1424s, which relies on a dozen 3.5-inch drives.

“It’s double the IOPS density at half the watts consumed,” says Mark Hall, Xyratex’s senior product marketing manager, explaining that the SP1224s handles around 5,000 to 6,000 IOPS.

“This is really directed at those transaction-intensive applications,” he adds. “It’s for things like virtualized environments and transaction-intensive databases that handle shopping carts on the Internet.”

Unlike its predecessor, the SP1224s uses SAS drives. In contrast, the SP1424s uses a mixture of SAS and SATA.By using Seagate’s 2.5-inch Savvio drives, Xyratex nonetheless claims to slash energy costs. “A typical [Seagate] 15K 3.5-inch drive consumes anywhere from 19 to 21 watts, whereas the 2.5-inch drives consume about 8.5 watts on average," Hall says.

Xyratex is not the only vendor beating the 2.5-inch drum at the moment -- witness HP’s decision to put the technology in its low-end Modular Smart Array (MSA) 70. “I would imagine that you’re going to see a lot of this coming,” says Hall. But he predicts that 3.5-inch drives will be around for a long time.

The SP1224s represents Xyratex’s second foray into green storage in the last few weeks. Less than two months ago, for example, the vendor added "MAID-style" spin-down disk technology to its F6412E RAID device and continues to make a song and dance about its green credentials.

Today’s hardware launch, for example, contains the vendor’s Intelligent Platform Manager (IPM) software, which enables Xyratex’s OEM partners to turn each individual drive off to save energy. “APIs in IPM have been opened up to OEMs,” says Lisa Hart, Xyratex’s vice president of marketing. “This is like having a light switch on your wall.”

Despite this hyperbole, Xyratex was unwilling to disclose exactly how many OEM partners are testing the SP1224s. “It’s available for OEMs today in samples,” says Hall. “As for [the OEMs], you can count them on a single hand, but we couldn’t say which ones.”The vendor indicated that the new offering could be priced between $3,200 and $4,000, although this does not include drives and would depend on the specific configuration.

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