PowerFile Sees Green

June 13, 2007: PowerFile has made a new push towards the green end of town, cutting the amount of energy consumed by its data archiving systems and announcing its new membership to the Green Grid Consortium.

The Green Grid is comprises of technology suppliers that seek to reduce energy consumption by providing a mix of recommendations, metrics and technologies. Members attempt to lead by example, which in PowerFiles case, means providing data archiving systems that use 5 percent of the power gobbled by traditional network attached disk storage systems.

PowerFile claims data centres use up to 50 times more energy than comparable office space, and archival systems that use cheap disk storage can run up huge power bills. It claims that the amount of power required to spin and cool disk systems consumer over five years amounts to half the total original purchase price of the equipment.

PowerFile claims its tiered approach to archive appliances ensures slower moving data can be shifted off high-cost storage and retained on near-line systems like its Active Archive Appliance (A3) with greater economy and permanence, and no change to existing infrastructure. It says this not only reduces the burden on the environment, but ends up saving significant amounts of cash on data centre electricity bills.

“As more and more organisations struggle with requirements associated with maintaining growing levels of data, energy and management expenses continue to climb to points that are costly from both an economic and environmental standpoint,” said Jonathan Buckley, Vice President of Marketing for PowerFile.

“By joining The Green Grid we are able to address the issue of energy efficiency in a positive, proactive manner, working with others to continue developing environmentally friendly solutions for the data centre.”

Buckley also notes that PowerFile will be announcing a rebate program in the US later this year in the hope that more companies will adopt its green solutions.

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