Eurostor 10Gb iSCSI and 8Gb FC RAIDs

At this year’s CeBIT in Hannover, European IT Storage Ltd. (EUROstor) will present, among others, RAID systems supporting the power management function of hard disks of recent date.

ES-6600 FC RAID, with 42 disks

RAID controllers using that function may contribute to save up to 50% of current electricity costs. A fully populated ES-6600 RAID with 42 hard disks of 2 TB each consumes about 520 W in normal operation. Without accessing the disks the consumption is reduced to 260 W after a certain time. Energy costs as well as the costs related to air conditioning in the computer room are reduced accordingly.
 
The period of time after which the hard disks enter the ‘sleep mode’ may be set on the RAID controller. With the next access to the data it takes a few seconds for the disks to achieve full rotation speed in order to provide or write the data.

Precondition for using this technology is, of course, that these functions are supported by the hard disks. This is the case with the Enterprise SATA-II hard disks manufactured by Hitachi and Seagate which are used by EUROstor.
 
It goes without saying that most energy is saved with those systems which are not continuously accessed – above all storage for hard disk backup and archiving systems. In this context the use of HSM solutions, in which these systems act as a secondary storage level for the relocation of rarely used data, is interesting as well.
 
“Since the energy consumption of the RAID systems accounts for an essential part of the overall costs of a data processing center, a reduction of electricity costs by 50% during the idle time is an important contribution to cost reduction and the protection of the environment” says Franz Bochtler, President of EUROstor. “But customers need not cut back on system performance: These systems are equipped with high performance controllers, operating at full capacity in modern storage networks with 8 Gbit Fibre Channel or 10 Gbit iSCSI.”
 
The price for a ES-6642SF 8 Gbit FC RAID system with 42 slots, at an initial capacity of 24 TB gross with 12 x  2 TB Enterprise SATA-II hard disks and 2 x 8 Gbit FC host interface, for example, amounts to €12,602.10 including VAT (€10,590.- without VAT).