Adaptec Drops Power Consumption

September 5, 2008: Shooting for significant reductions in power use of disk-based storage systems, Adaptec has introduced a new RAID controller-based power management solution for both SATA and SAS storage, dubbing it an industry-first.

The company has kicked off its Green Power initiative with the introduction of its Intelligent Power Management, a new feature that it says enables custom-storage system configurations to be created, reducing power consumption by up to 70 percent without sacrificing performance.

Adaptec says that the solution s ideal for applications with large blocks of idle time, such as disk-to-disk backup, e-mail archiving and file and print servers. It allows drives to be operated in three power states: 1) Normal operation: full power, full RPM (revolutions per minute); 2) Standby: low-power mode that spins disks at lower RPM during idle periods; and 3) Power-off: disks not spinning.

Blackout periods can be set in which power management features are disabled, such as during peak IT activity periods, and IT managers can configure banks of disk drives to operate in different power states at varying times, automatically spinning up and down according to usage patterns.

The controller also automatically monitors drives that have been powered down for an extended period of time to ensure systems are still working without fault - reducing drive failures and increasing drive life expectancy.

“As global data storage needs grow dramatically, so does the need for even more high-performance disk drives. Disk drives consume about 33 percent of all the storage in an IT environment and are one of the most energy-intensive components in any computing system,” said Suresh Panikar, director of worldwide marketing, Adaptec. “The cost and energy savings achieved with Intelligent Power Management are enormous – potentially several hundred thousand dollars per year.”

Intelligent Power Management is now integrated into all of Adaptec’s high-performance Series 5 and Series 2 Unified Serial RAID controllers.

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