The good green news in the EMC CX announcement was the hardware features. The noteworthy items were:
- Tier-0 flash drives with 98 percent better efficiency per I/O than 15K FC disks,
- Use of the Western Digital “SATA green drives,” which spin at 5,400 RPM vs. the more traditional 7,200 RPM; this saves 30% of the power to the drive,
- Policy-based disk spin-down, which automatically places inactive drives into sleep mode.
- Adaptive cooling, which dynamically adjusts cooling based on system activity.
The bad news was the lack of software to support the hardware. EMC talked about an API that it would release to backup software manufacturers later this year. There is no software that would allow data to be migrated to the appropriate drives or automatically spin down the drives.
Action Item: As the largest storage vendor by far, EMC needs to take a leadership role. EMC needs to work with Microsoft and other leading software providers to create open de facto standards for “MAID-aware” systems software. EMC also needs to provide automated tier management software that will migrate data to the appropriate tier based on usage classification.
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