CRNTech: Ecofriendly box building

Seagate’s Brian Martin, senior director of Product Environmental Compliance, sums up the situation: “We’re green because our customers are green.”

Vendors constantly struggle with dozens– if not hundreds – of customers, each with a slightly different take on being green. Manufacturers like Seagate then have to comply with each customer’s environmental requirements in a cost-effective manner.

Within the enterprise, Seagate Savvio, Constellation and Cheetah drives reduce data centre power and cooling by up to 92 percent with features including PowerTrim and on-demand PowerChoice technologies. Seagate Self-Encrypting Drives (SED) with instant SecureErase technology are available across all enterprise drive families. A single comman

Many products and services saw a decrease in demand in 2009, but one area that did see strong growth was storage. Social media sites such as Facebook and Flicker, for example, are driving a huge demand for digital repositories – and that requires hard drive space. Darrin Bulik, director of Western Digital product marketing, said Western Digital was the “first on the block” with its class of 3.5-inch, 2-TB enterprise SATA hard drives, the RE4-GP.

The drives provide low cost-of-ownership to organisations with large data centres. By Western Digital’s estimates, its GreenPower Technology can save large data-hungry organisations, such as financial institutions and search engine services, up to US$10 per drive per year in electricity costs. For a large data

The chip maker, in collaboration with industry standards organisations such as the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. and The Green Grid, is helping to develop a more reliable metric that measures energy consumption and performance for all levels of utilisation, from idle to peak, that a server would experience in a typical day, week or month. The goal is to give server manufacturers better guidelines for designing energy-efficient servers, better ways to demonstrate energy efficiency to customers and fairer product comparisons for competition on the basis of energy efficiency.

“Intel is interesting because of the position we play in the ecosystem of the supply chain,” said Ted Reichelt, principal environmental engineer, Global Environmental

“The move toward energy efficiency is definitely growing,” said Brent Kerby, senior product manager for the AMD Opteron processor. AMD has long been selling the ecofriendly aspects of its processors to whitebox builders. As one of the founders of Green Grid, AMD helps provide guidance to manufacturers and system integrators to drive efficiencies across the data centre.

For the past seven years, AMD has listened to customers as they’ve faced the challenges of having enough power for servers and for cooling them.

Processors have come a long way since the AM386 nearly 20 years ago. Today’s Opteron will automatically back its foot off the throttle if it’s not “busy.” Memory is a huge component of power, but data centre managers need efficie