Analysis

posted on 22 August 2008 15:29

It would be nice to be able to buy gold standard EPEAT storage like you can buy a gold-standard EPEAT-blessed laptop or PC and get the greenest kit going - but it isn't likely to happen because the vendors won't support a strong EPEAT standard.

EPEAT is the US-based Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool and is a programme of the US Green Electronics Council. It produces clear and unambiguous environmental standards for monitors, notebok and desktop computers based upon their manufactuers use of hazardous materials, waste disposal activities, and product energy energy usage. There are three levels of EPEAT greeness, bronze, silver and gold, with defined criteria, and manufacturers happily rate their kit, not least because US federal purchasers are mandated to buy EPEAT-rated products.

You can search for EPEAT-rated products here.

The thing of it is that a PC or notebook is a PC or notebook is a PC or notebook but a server isn't a server isn't a server, and nor is storage if you see what I mean.

HDS' chief technology officer Hu Yoshida has written a thoughtful post on coming EPEAT green storage standards following on from EPEAT's current development of a green server standard.

For its coming server standard EPEAT has decided to remove power management and virtualization from the mandatory standard criteria and make them disclosable items. It seems that if they were mandatory then vendors offering servers with software to better manage their power and to virtualise operating systems would be put at a commercial advantage. EPEAT needs a level playing field to get the major vendors to play together and support it and effectively disqualifying vendors because they don't have proprietary technology from someone else is not what it is about.

Hu suggests that the same thing could apply to storage and suggests that: "features like MAID, spin down, thin provisioning, de-duplication, copy on write, single instance store, tiered storage, archive and virtualization may not be in the specification, and may only appear in Appendix A. Is this good or bad?"

Well, it's bad obviously because these features reduce the number of spinning disk drives needed and so cut power needs. But you don't buy green storage per se. You decide on a storage strategy for particular data and then buy storage for that data. You can't use MAID arrays for transaction data because, green as they are, they're also slower to respond than constantly spinning Fibre Channel drives or solid state drives.

If EPEAT did have a MAID criteria what would it use? Copan MAID, Nexsan AutoMAID, some other spin-down idea? Getting agreement between vendors here would be tough.

Thin-provisioning may be an easier issue to deal with and it may be arguable that, say, gold-standard EPEAT storage must be thinly-provisioned. Logically we might add that gold-standard storage must use sub-file-level deduplication, with silver standard using single-file instances and bronze standard having only compression.

Dealing with tiered storage would be very difficult. How would tiers be defined for a start?

EPEAT's problem is going to be to have meaningful categories of green storage that provide sensible choice to customers and have vendor support. It may prove a bridge too far and all end in tears.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}