Hewlett-Packard on Monday unveiled "green" storage technology that, it claims, can reduce storage array power and cooling costs in data centres by 50%.
Speaking at the HP Technology Forum 2007, held in Las Vegas, in the US, Mark Gonzales, VP of sales, enterprise servers and storage for the Americas, showcased the company's new HP StorageWorks EVA 4100, 6100 and 8100 midrange disk arrays.
He told media representatives that, as part of the company's new adaptive infrastructure, the HP StorageWorks EVA (Enterprise Virtual Array) tape drives improve power efficiency by up to 45% compared to previous EVAs, and performance by up to 24%.
He described the new offerings as a "big, big, big deal", explaining that current SAN architects create "lungs" within storage devices and move data around between these. This is called EVA Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM).
"Once they cave out these lungs, they use up the [capacity]; it doesn't matter how much data you have within that array.
"What we basically are announcing is a technology that recognises how much data you actually have within those lungs, so you can overprovision the array and your only charge, in terms of what you're utilising, is the amount of content you have within it."
This means users no longer have to buy as much storage as before, Gonzales said, adding this means less power and cooling is required.
However, Gonzales stated the new DCM technology is particularly "revolutionary" in that it not only allows the user to expand "lungs", but also shrink them, as required, when data is deleted.
This means that, similar to thin provisioning, DCM software enables customers to double capacity utilisation rates and delay the purchase of additional hard drives. Leveraging the new virtual disk service volume shrink feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2008, DCM continuously monitors storage utilisation rates and grows or shrinks host volumes to match application data needs.
Gonzales also stated tape continues to be the most energy-efficient storage technology for long-term data retention.
He explained the next-generation HP Ultrium and DAT tape formats are proven technologies that offer the lowest cost per terabyte.
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