News

Spectra Logic joins the Green Grid

posted on 13 March 2008 04:04

Another tape automation vendor puts its shoulder to the green wheel

Tape automation and disk backup vendor Spectra Logic has joined the Green Grid, the consortium focused on lowering data centre energy usage.

The Green Grid seeks to provide industry-wide recommendations on best practices, metrics and technologies that will improve overall data center and business computing energy efficiencies.

Spectra Logic has a foot in both tape and disk-based data protection camps so the move makes perfect sense. It will, it hopes, be better equpped to respond to users' energy-saving needs through its Green Grid membership.

The company notes that it designs its intelligent secondary storage disk appliances and tape libraries with the EnergyAudit˙ power usage and monitoring feature included as standard. EnergyAudit taps directly into the power supply to track how much power is in use real time, and can report the data in watts per cubic foot, square foot or terabyte. Spectra Logic designs power efficiency savings into all secondary storage platforms. For example, the Spectra T950 annual energy costs for power and cooling are more than 50 percent less than other enterprise-class tape libraries.

Robert Stevenson, storage research MD for TheInfoPro, said: "End users continue to note in our research that the finite power allocation planned for future storage growth is often consumed months, if not years, ahead of expectations and that close to 25 percent of all new data centers are being created to address this growth in power usage. Spectra Logic's EnergyAudit feature offers a step towards energy measurement, allowing for better management of power usage within existing data centers."