Xiotech Submits Storage Industry’s First SPC Benchmark 1/Energy Results

Xiotech Corporation announced that its Emprise 5000 storage system, powered by Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, produced the storage industry’s first results with the Storage Performance Council‘s new benchmark extension, SPC Benchmark 1/Energy (SPC-1/E). The results show that the system delivers significant energy savings, and consequently cost savings, in production data centers.

The SPC’s new industry-standard SPC-1/E benchmark extension, just announced, consists of the complete set of SPC-1 performance measurements and reporting combined with measurement and reporting of energy use. SPC-1/E extends the range of storage configurations that can be measured and complements SPC-1C/E, the first SPC benchmark extension, which focuses on storage components.

"We’ve long been supporters of the SPC, because its measurements are among the most reliable, credible tools available to end users to help evaluate storage solutions in an apples-to-apples fashion and make good purchasing decisions," said Xiotech Vice President of Marketing Mike Hoch. "Because energy costs comprise up to 11 percent of the total cost of storage, organizations must consider energy consumption when evaluating storage systems. With this new benchmark extension, the SPC has validated the importance of green storage today and armed users with real-world measurements to help them make the best storage decisions."

The Xiotech Emprise 5000 SPC-1/E Results featured PowerNAP, which allows the Emprise 5000 to be placed in a low-power standby mode during idle periods. In the case of the 146 GB, 15K RPM disk drive configuration, PowerNAP reduced the energy use from 413.44w to 23.37w, a savings of 95 percent. The 600 GB, 10K RPM configuration with PowerNAP measured an energy use reduction from 331.98w to 23.45w, for a savings of 93 percent. These two SPC-1/E results represent the first industry-standard measurement of a power management feature such as PowerNAP, and provide insight into the potentially considerable energy cost savings possible from utilizing such a feature.

"The SPC congratulates Xiotech on being the first SPC member company to produce SPC-1/E results," said Storage Performance Council administrator Walter E. Baker. "With the two Xiotech SPC-1/E Results an end-user has, for the first time, the information to compare performance, price-performance and energy use based on their requirements for each factor. In addition, Xiotech’s use of PowerNAP in both results definitively illustrates the impact of such a power management feature and its significant potential to lower energy costs."

The Xiotech Emprise 5000 with 146 GB, 15K RPM disk drives produced 6,962.40 SPC-1 IOPS(tm), at $3.05/SPC-1 IOPS, with an Annual Energy Use of 2,803.75 kWh. The same product with 600 GB, 10K RPM disk drives produced 6,065.96 SPC-1 IOPS(tm), at $9.55/SPC-1 IOPS, with an Annual Energy Use of 2,219.65 kWh. These data show that the lower performance drives reduce performance by 12 percent but deliver an energy savings of 20 percent, a non-linear correlation which can be further exploited as users scale up the system and add more drives.

PowerNAP is available today on all Emprise 5000 systems, and is especially valuable for situations when organizations do not need their storage systems powered up all of the time, such as for backup to disk, disaster recovery, archival storage or remote sites that only need access during standard business hours. Using established and well known Wake-on-LAN protocols, PowerNAP can be initiated from the system management interface, by logging into the system from a remote console or in an automated fashion for regular, hands-off use. The typical power-down time with PowerNAP is 40 seconds, and the system can be awakened and ready for I/O activity in just 60 seconds.

Emprise 5000 is a self-enclosed, virtual storage building block that can be attached to servers either directly or via a switch. Four storage tiers are available, with a maximum capacity of 16 terabytes. Performance scales linearly, so that two systems roughly double the performance of one.

ISE technology, the basis for Xiotech’s Emprise 5000 storage systems, significantly minimizes disk-related service events through a combination of preventive and self-healing capabilities. It offers 100 percent usable storage capacity with no vendor holdbacks or drops in performance, and achieves the industry’s most efficient performance and scalability. In addition, it enables users to cut their ongoing storage costs in half through its five-year warranty and lower overall management costs.

To read the Xiotech Emprise 5000 SPC-1/E Executive Summary and Report