SNIA Engaged With US Environmental Protection Agency

The Storage Networking Industry Association‘s Green Storage Initiative (GSI) announced significant progress and has built momentum in support of several additional Green initiatives.

The SNIA has actively engaged with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ENERGY STAR Program over the past year on development of an ENERGY STAR Data Center Storage Specification. The SNIA has submitted 31 datasets to the EPA for their data collection project and 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 EPRI.

Additional momentum over the last 12 months includes:

• Technical Development: The Capacity Optimization subgroup of the SNIA Green 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 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.

It is with great sadness that the GSI notes 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.

About the Green Storage Initiative
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. SNIA’s Green Storage activities take place in two separate working bodies, the Green Storage Initiative Technical Working Group (GSI TWG) and the Green Storage Initiative. The GSI TWG is focused on developing test metrics by which energy consumption and efficiency can be measured. The Green Storage Initiative is focused on creating and publicizing best practices for energy efficient storage networking, educating the vendor and user community, and promoting storage-centric applications that reduce storage footprint and associated power requirements.