Adaptec Intelligent Power Management Reduces Storage Power Consumption Up To 70%

To significantly increase the energy efficiency of disk-based storage, Adaptec Inc., a global leader in storage solutions, recently kicked off its Green Power initiative with the introduction of Adaptec Intelligent Power Management, a new capability that allows system OEMs, integrators and IT managers to easily custom-configure storage systems to reduce power consumption by up to 70 percent without sacrificing performance. Intelligent Power Management is now integrated into all of Adaptec's high-performance, award-winning Series 5 and Series 2 Unified Serial RAID controllers.

Accessed through Adaptec Storage Manager software, Intelligent Power Management supports both SATA and SAS drives and is ideal for applications with large blocks of idle time, such as disk-to-disk backup, e-mail archiving and file and print servers. It allows drives to be operated in three power states: 1) Normal operation: full power, full RPM (revolutions per minute); 2) Standby1: low-power mode that spins disks at lower RPM during idle periods; and 3) Power-off: disks not spinning. In addition, blackout periods can be set in which power management features are disabled, such as during peak IT activity periods.

IT managers can configure banks of disk drives to operate in different power states at varying times, and automate the drives to spin up and down according to drive usage patterns. When drives are accessed during pre-configured spin-down to Standby or Power-off modes, Intelligent Power Management quickly and automatically powers these drives back up, as needed, so performance is not impacted. Also, the Adaptec RAID controller automatically monitors drives that have been powered down for an extended period of time to ensure systems moreare still fully operational, allowing Intelligent Power Management to help reduce drive failures and increase drive life expectancy.

"As global data storage needs grow dramatically, so does the need for even more highperformance disk drives. Disk drives consume about 33 percent of all the storage in an IT environment2 and are one of the most energy-intensive components in any computing system," said Suresh Panikar, director of worldwide marketing, Adaptec. "With Intelligent Power Management, we are expanding the capabilities of our RAID controllers to address this issue. The cost and energy savings achieved with Intelligent Power Management are enormous – potentially several hundred thousand dollars per year."

IDC estimates that over 50 million disk drives are currently spinning in external storage arrays worldwide, with the cost of powering and cooling those drives exceeding $1.3B annually.3 Because of increasing energy costs, corporations are placing increased pressure on IT departments to find solutions that reduce power consumption and their overall carbon footprint to both save money and promote overall green initiatives. Adaptec's Intelligent Power Management can play a significant role in many of these budget-cutting and green directives.

"The storage industry continues to offer up a variety of solutions to help end customers to conserve energy," said Dave Reinsel, IDC group vice president, storage and semiconductors. "Solutions, like Adaptec's, that provide IT managers the flexibility in managing disk drives at various power states and spin speeds, are an important part of the overall equation in bringing more efficiency to the data center."

Adaptec Intelligent Power Management is compatible with 122 disk drives across five leading vendors, and the list of compatible drives is constantly expanding. Two examples of the significant reduction in power consumption found with two leading enterprise disk drives using Intelligent Power Management include:

• Seagate Barracuda ES SATA drive: power reduced by 70 percent from 8.6 watts in Full Power mode to 2.2 watts in Power-off mode
• Hitachi Ultrastar SAS drive: power reduced by 73 percent from 16.7 watts in Full Power mode to 4.4 watts in Power-off mode.

With Intelligent Power Management, the larger the deployment of controllers and the more drives connected to each controller, the larger the savings. Deployments of hundreds of Adaptec RAID controllers, connected to thousands of drives through expanders can lead to a cost savings of several hundred thousand dollars annually.

Adaptec Green Partners

Seagate Technology LLC
"As the world's leading disk drive manufacturer, Seagate is extremely interested in complimentary data storage technologies that can add to the overall value of our drives," said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. "Adaptec Unified Serial controllers with Intelligent Power Management coupled with Seagate SATA and SAS disk drives with our PowerTrim technology combine to deliver dramatic data center energy savings with no sacrifice in performance."

Western Digital
"Adaptec Intelligent Power Management used in conjunction with Western Digital's high-capacity SATA drives delivers the industry's leading I/O performance while minimizing power consumption," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of Enterprise Storage Solutions, Western Digital. "Western Digital is committed to working with Adaptec, and other storage ecosystems partners, to develop eco-friendly solutions for customers that reduce costs and help meet their green storage objectives."

Supermicro
"As a leader in energy efficient computing, Supermicro embraces green technology and supports Adaptec's approach to further "greening" the data center with Intelligent Power Management," said Tau Leng, general manager of marketing and HPC at Supermicro. "Providing our customers with earth-friendly Server Building Block Solutions is a top priority at Supermicro, and we look forward to incorporating Adaptec Intelligent Power Management into our industry-leading green server and storage solutions."

AIC
"At AIC, we've made a public commitment to providing environmentally-conscious storage chassis solutions that provide state-of-the-art performance and full-feature capabilities for a wide range of applications," said Gene Lee, corporate vice president of AIC. "Adaptec's new Intelligent Power Management on its Unified Serial controllers dovetails perfectly with this strategy, delivering products that further push the ‘green envelope.'"

Chenbro
"Reducing power consumption is at the top of virtually every one of our customers' requirement lists; along with performance, reliability and cost," said Maggi Chen, president, Chenbro, a leading PC, server and rack mount chassis provider. "Adaptec's Unified Serial controllers with its new Intelligent Power Management software provide the ideal I/O solution that meets or exceeds all these criteria. At Chenbro we believe that in an increasingly competitive world for IT products, optimal energy efficiency is a must-have capability."

Rorke Data
"Rorke Data is a subsidiary of Bell Microproducts that specializes in data storage solutions for diverse Digital Content applications such as Surveillance, Broadcast and Healthcare Imaging. As the sheer amount of data storage in each of these markets grows exponentially in just the next few years, our customers are demanding new levels of efficiency and cost savings that goes beyond the metric of price per gigabyte plus service contract costs," said Joe Rorke, vice president of marketing,and related operational costs but also overlays well with overall Green initiatives within these storagecentric vertical markets."

"Greening" Tiered Data Storage with Intelligent Power Management
In the last several years, many IT departments have implemented tiered storage systems as a means of cost-efficiently managing their growing data storage requirements. Tiered storage is a method of organizing and prioritizing data based on the importance of the data and/or the frequency with which it is accessed. In a tiered storage environment, very important and frequently accessed data is stored on high-performance drives while less important and infrequently accessed data is stored on lower-performing, less expensive drives. By using Adaptec Intelligent Power Management, companies can easily and at no additional cost further increase the efficiency of tiered storage architectures. By powering down the drives used to store "tier two" data, IT departments can significantly reduce power consumed.

Adaptec's Green Commitment
As the need to reduce IT energy costs becomes increasingly important in today's IT environments, through its Green Power initiative, Adaptec has increased its focus on energy efficient technology development to address this issue. Underscoring this commitment, Adaptec is a member of the Green Grid , a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

Intelligent Power Management Availability
Intelligent Power Management is offered as standard on all Series 5 and Series 2 Unified Serial RAID controllers, which are available immediately from Adaptec distributors and resellers.

About Adaptec
Adaptec provides trusted storage solutions that reliably move, manage, and protect critical data and digital content. Adaptec's software and hardware-based solutions are delivered through leading channel partners and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to provide storage connectivity, data protection, and networked storage to enterprises, government organizations, medium and small businesses worldwide. More information is available at www.adaptec.com.

SOURCE: Adaptec