StorMagic Virtualized Storage Helps Companies Run Efficiently With Smaller Carbon Footprints

In honor of Earth Day, StorMagic, Inc. offers suggestions to help businesses hit green IT goals to reduce the amount of power, cooling and physical infrastructure required, while ensuring HA to critical applications and data.

Virtualizing storage to reduce infrastructure and energy consumption

• Reduce energy usage with software defined storage: SvSAN doesn’t create any additional power or cooling demands, above the ones required for the servers that already exist onsite for the business applications, because it is a software solution. It is installed as a virtual storage appliance and runs on any x86 server currently supported by either vSphere or Hyper-V hypervisors.

• Reduce e-waste by using existing servers: Organizations can use any power efficient server of their choice or reuse/repurpose existing equipment. They can prolong the useful life of the equipment, reducing the number of servers becoming e-waste.

• Minimize server and storage footprint: SvSAN minimizes hardware footprint because it turns internal server storage into highly available shared storage using a minimum of two servers onsite. The ability to create a pool of storage that can be shared by physical and virtual servers eliminates the need for a SAN or external storage arrays, which tend to be power hungry.

• Reduce resource requirements: SvSAN minimizes server resource requirements, only requiring a single processor and 1GB of memory to deliver the storage services, and leaving all other server resources dedicated to business applications. This allows customers and partners to scale the StorMagic solution to the exact business requirements using smaller servers with fewer power requirements, rather than overprovisioning hardware.

• Leverage power efficient storage: SvSAN can use any storage that it has been allocated, including power efficient storage technologies such as low power, high capacity HDDs and high performance solid-state disks or flash drives. The flexibility to use any storage technology enables companies to balance capacity, performance and power needs.

• Reduce carbon footprint tied to travel: Because SvSAN can be deployed, configured, upgraded and supported from a central management location, organizations with extensive remote office networks can forgo site visits, reducing the fuel consumed to travel to site along with the travel related CO² emissions.

“Green IT initiatives typically revolve around reducing the amount of power consumed, including the power used to cool the equipment,” said Hans O’Sullivan, co-founder and CEO, StorMagic. “Reducing power and cooling requirements can be achieved by reducing the number of infrastructure components, and using power efficient hardware. StorMagic SvSAN delivers not only measurable Green IT improvement, but also OPEX savings, by reducing power, cooling, maintenance, and support costs for growing businesses or remote locations running critical applications onsite, without dedicated local IT resources.“