File Server Consolidation: OnStor Responds To Industry Initiative To Reduce Energy Consumption By Enabling Green Data Center Operation
ONStor Inc., the provider of scalable clustered NAS solutions for the enterprise, recently announced a strong foothold in the "greening of the data center" movement by enabling companies to drastically reduce power consumption in their IT environment by deploying ONStor storage solutions, which have built-in advanced power management and file server consolidation technology. Responding to the recent Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which calls for computer makers and their customers to adopt technologies that significantly reduce energy consumption, ONStor outlined the savings it brings to businesses as compared with traditional direct-attached and networked storage environments, with up to:
- 95% power savings
- 90% fewer devices to manage; and
- 90% space savings.
By 2010, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative seeks to reduce global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons per year, equivalent to the annual output of 11 million cars or 10–20 coal-fired power plants. The initiative's projected result is a 50% reduction in power consumption by computers by 2010; committed participants could collectively save $5.5 billion in energy costs.
The Uptime Institute, in its "The Economic Breakdown of Moore's Law," lists "Virtualizing Servers" among its top five recommendations for saving energy in the data center. ONStor scalable clustered NAS systems, which are deployed across a broad range of demanding enterprise IT applications including large-scale Windows server consolidation, Internet content delivery, and digital imaging, virtualize multiple physical file systems across both ONStor virtual file servers and Windows file servers. The resulting server consolidation exerts a smaller footprint on the data center floor, inherently drawing less power and requiring far less cooling. ONStor's systems typically replace up to 10 file servers with a single NAS appliance that is only 1.75 inches high. Moreover, ONStor's advanced power management, standard on all units, uses only 160 watts of power per NAS appliance. Each NAS appliance draws a little over 1 AMP of power consumption - 55% lower than the industry standard.
Bob Miller, ONStor's CEO, states, "Green programs that are sweeping the IT industry, such as The Climate Savers Computing Initiative and the EPA's Energy Star Program, validate what we've been offering our customers all along: high-performance storage solutions that cut down on unnecessary energy consumption, reducing costs and carbon dioxide emissions. By exceeding these ambitious energy efficiency recommendations, we're excited to support our partners and our customers in their efforts towards reaching a common goal for the industry: to reduce energy waste and improve businesses' bottom line. As part of that commitment, ONStor will be announcing a green initiative in the coming months."
The rising power consumption among data centers is exacerbated by the need to store data in the face of exponential growth and is also due in part to the trend towards centralizing corporate computing functions; the last few years saw double-digit growth in new servers and storage devices in the data center. Add to that rising electricity costs at the same time as processors themselves become more powerful – the costs associated with running these 24/7 while cooling them down at the same time are staggering. Finally, data centers' imperative to ensure 100% uptime often leads to overbuilding, over-provisioning of computing platforms, and overinvestment in infrastructures like cooling systems, all leading to significant energy waste.
"At a time when power costs are skyrocketing and energy compliance regulations are becoming more stringent, ONStor's clustered NAS systems and gateways are at the vanguard of the green movement, providing data centers with a viable and cost-effective alternative to legacy NAS systems that are not designed for energy efficiency," said Steve Norall, senior analyst at the Taneja Group, which is soon to release a comprehensive research report on the state of green in the IT industry. "ONStor's ability to run 10 file servers for what it takes to power a lightbulb and shrink real estate consumed by servers to a fraction, is an achievement that customers on the lookout for a way to reduce power usage can't afford to ignore. The future is undeniably green, and ONStor is making it easy for companies to be green today."
About ONStor
ONStor drives down the cost of storage management by delivering scalable clustered NAS that saves enterprises 50 percent on total cost of ownership with systems that let customers start small and scale massively as their requirements grow. ONStor's award-winning Pantera Clustered NAS Systems and Bobcat NAS Gateways consolidate information from multiple Windows, UNIX and Linux devices into a single, highly scalable file storage environment. The open storage architecture allows existing assets to be leveraged, while integrated file server virtualization enables resources to be redeployed quickly to accommodate changing needs. Proven at hundreds of enterprise customer sites, ONStor delivers the cost-effective approach to scalable storage. More information about ONStor can be found at www.onstor.com.
SOURCE: ONStor Inc.