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Are 'Green' Drives Really Green?
What is a green drive? Basically, it's a drive that can slow down its RPM's to be able to conserve power. There also are green archive systems, which can power-manage drives and turn them off. In either case, the power consumption part kicks in after a certain period of idle time or when the system has the intelligence to decide that it is unlikely to need access to those drives again and it is OK to either spin them down or power them off. Another Shade Of Green This is another shade of green. While not the classic of drives that are powered down after a period of inactivity, it's rather drives that are never powered because they are never purchased. Archive And Green Many of the storage manufacturers are beginning to offer green drives as an add-on to their existing storage systems, and then some manufacturers such as Copan Systems and NexSan have specific systems that target the space. In our next entry, we'll look at some of the architectural differences between these systems. Then we will pull this all together in our upcoming Webcast, Demystifying Primary Storage Data Reduction. Track us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/storageswiss. Subscribe to our RSS feed. George Crump is founder of Storage Switzerland, an analyst firm focused on the virtualization and storage marketplaces. It provides strategic consulting and analysis to storage users, suppliers, and integrators. An industry veteran of more than 25 years, Crump has held engineering and sales positions at various IT industry manufacturers and integrators. Prior to Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest integrators. « Green Computing? Offset This | Main | Go-oo: OpenOffice.org, Reloaded » |
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