Dataupia CTO Breaks Down the "Green Equation"

By Michelle Savage

April 1, 2008 —  Dataupia, maker of the Satori Server 12000, is emphasizing the “green” benefits of its data warehouse appliance. The company claims the server uses about 10 percent of the energy needed by a traditional server and half the energy that a SAN would need to store similar types of data.

Research shows that IT organizations face increasing pressure to adopt “green”—or energy-efficient—computing practices. A Gartner study showed that the No. 1 strategic technology for 2008 is green IT. An IDC survey said that nearly 80 percent of executives say that green IT is a growing priority for their business, and more than 50 percent of customers consider IT vendors’ “greenness” when choosing a supplier.

John O'Brien, Dataupia’s CTO, claims the lower total ownership cost is the driving factor when it comes to “greening” data centers. “People are saying that our ‘greenness’ in their environment has been a leading component in their decision to use Dataupia,” said O’Brien. “Physical acquisition costs are getting lower and everyone is competing on that level. Dataupia is unique in that it has a significantly lower total ownership cost over three years versus traditional servers.”

O’Brien explained how carbon footprints are calculated in the data center with what he called a “greening equation.” The equation has three components, which make up the power footprint: the power being consumed by the equipment; the cooling that is required for equipment to work; and the space that equipment takes up in a data center.

Several data center trends, including blades and virtualization, help to alleviate this energy footprint and reduce space requirements by increasing density or maximizing the utilization of equipment, according to O’Brien.

The data warehouse appliance trend utilizes TCP/IP network connections and standard Ethernet network switches, reducing a data center’s power and cooling needs, which in turn reduces the need for space. “The difference in the architecture means you don’t need a lot of power-hungry components, such as SAN switches,” said O’Brien.

The data warehouse architecture with the appliances is a Massively Parallel Processor  architecture in which the computing is done at the storage level. The only thing that is sent up to the database server is the result set, which is much more efficient. “You’re reducing cost, complexity and power,” said O’Brien.

O’Brien said that user feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with users reporting a dramatic decrease in overall power consumption. But moving to an energy-efficient server is not a magic bullet for greening a data center, as servers are only one component of the overall system.

“We have a situation in data centers where they have lots of incumbent equipment that is not green,” said O’Brien. “Data center managers need to come up with green strategy to evaluate new technologies as they come in and determine how they will age out older equipment. This should be an ongoing program—not a one-time solution.”



Related Search Term(s): Data centers, Dataupia, Satori

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