The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) launched its initial Green Storage Initiative (GSI) Green Storage Power Measurement Specification for public review and comment.

The initial Green Storage Power Measurement Specification includes a "Green Storage Taxonomy" for classifying storage products based on energy consumption characteristics and application environments, as well as a baseline standard for idle power metrics which can be applied as a uniform method for collecting idle power consumption measurements.

The Idle Power Measurement specification outlines a standard for testing and measuring storage power consumption at idle. The idle power measurements will be reported in raw GB per Watt (GB/W) based on: Manufacturer model number; Raw storage capacity; Storage media RPM and interface of each type of storage media within the storage device; The number of enclosures/systems in the online or near-online taxonomy category The number of tape drives for systems in the removable-media library taxonomy category.

"This initial release of the Green Storage Power Measurement Specification will play an important role moving forward in helping the storage industry, standards-setting organisations, and global governmental agencies, measure and shape the energy and power efficiency of storage systems," said Leah Schoeb, Chairperson of the SNIA Green Storage Initiative. "The Green Storage Initiative is dedicated to applying the technical and educational expertise of our members to help develop more energy efficient solutions for the IT industry."

"There are many technologies on the market today that allow organisations to better manage their storage environments and reduce their power and cooling requirements and in EMEA as in the rest of the world, SNIA supports local government initiatives around energy savings," said Juergen Arnold, SNIA Europe Chairman and European Liaison to SNIA Green Storage Initiative.

"SNIA Europe has been contributing to the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency driven by the European Commission to facilitate the promotion of greener storage and I am looking forward to becoming involved in more such initiatives." Examples of best practices for the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency related to storage include: When selecting storage hardware evaluate the energy efficiency in terms of the service delivered per Watt between options. This may be deployment specific and should include the achieved performance and storage volume per Watt as well as additional factors where appropriate, such as the achieved levels of data protection, performance availability and recovery capability required to meet the business service level requirements defined in the data management policy.

Evaluate both the in use power draw and the peak power of the storage device(s) as configured, both impact per device cost and energy consumption through provisioning. The Green Storage Taxonomy was designed to classify storage systems based on feature criteria for the application environments that they are intended to support. The application environments are divided into 5 categories (classes) ranging from small home/office applications (SOHO) to larger enterprise-oriented applications. The feature criteria for each storage system class are based on the required level of data protection, component redundancy, serviceability, data access time, and range of energy consumption.

"The U.S. EPA welcomes SNIA's leadership and ability to reach across the industry to address the growing energy challenges confronting data centre operators across the globe." said Andrew Fanara, of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR Product Development Team. "The industry metrics developed through SNIA's Green Storage Initiative will help to quantify energy consumption and identify new opportunities to improve data center energy efficiency." The storage system categories covered under the Green Storage Taxonomy are; Online Near-Online, Removable Media Libraries, Non-Removable Media Libraries, Infrastructure Appliances, and Infrastructure Switches.

Throughout 2009, SNIA's GSI intends to expand the Green Storage Power Measurement Specification to include development of standardised active power measurement guidelines and metrics, standardised storage system power supply efficiency specifications as well as promotion and publication of each vendor's completed test metrics.

The detailed SNIA Green Storage Power Measurement Specification including the Green Storage Taxonomy can be found at: SNIA Public Review.