data center power savings storage

Ask the Expert: Green Storage for the Enterprise Data Center

Over at VMworld.com they have just started the second "Ask the Expert" session, this time featuring Larry Aszmann, CTO of Compellent Technologies. You can view Larry’s presentation online, and then Larry has promised to stick around for a few weeks to answer your questions.

[Update: just finished watching Larry’s presentation and it’s very interesting. It’s really much more about the Green Data Center and how to reduce your spend than an advertisement for Compellent’s products. Some factoids: 80% of data center energy is wasted; data center energy consumption is going to double from 2006 to 20011. Here’s the kicker: 2/3 of data center energy is on supporting your IT devices — servers, storage, networking. Data center buildout is extremely capital intensive (and is a gift to your landlord when your lease is up). So every time you increase the energy usage of your servers & storage, your total energy spend goes up 3x as much. Thus, virtualize your servers and look at your storage. 25% of disk space is actually used — so use thin provisioning. 80% of your data is inactive and rarely accessed, so use ILM — information lifecycle management — that puts inactive data on slower, less power hungry devices. Literally cool stuff.]

Link: VMworld: Compellent Expert Session.

February 11-22, 2008

Larry Aszmann, CTO of Compellent Technologies
Lawrence E. Aszmann has served as CTO and Secretary since co-founding
Compellent in March 2002. From July 1995 to August 2001, Mr. Aszmann
served as CTO of Xiotech, which Mr. Aszmann co-founded in July 1995.

Expert Session Overview
Compellent Storage Center is one of the most powerful and easy-to-use
SAN in the marketplace. Compellent offers technology independence that
allows enterprise customers to mix and match iSCSI and Fibre Channel
connectivity and manage multiple tiers of Fibre Channel and SATA disk
technologies from one pool of virtual storage. The powerful GUI manages
native thin provisioning, hardware snapshot, snapshot replication and
automated tiered storage all from a web browser with no server-side
code or agents.