Data center challenges in today's business climate

The amount of data that your company is storing is growing exponentially – and so are your data center utility bills.

As enterprises continue to deploy more servers and storage devices to keep pace with their exploding data storage needs, power consumption requirements and costs are also heating up to unprecedented levels. A recent study from industry analyst IDC estimates that data center electricity costs are already in the $3.3 billion annual range, and according to the InfoPro Wave 9 study, "40% of power in the data center is now for data storage."

It can also cost more to cool a data center than it does to lease the floor space that houses it. One industry expert estimates that the average utility cost for a 100,000 square-foot data center is over $6 million per year!  For some companies, this means that they now must compensate by moving to new facilities, putting off hardware purchases, or leaving floor space unoccupied to avoid paying corresponding utility costs.

How a COPAN Systems solution can save you money

COPAN Systems Enterprise MAID solution is purpose-built for persistent data. Persistent data can now be kept online at a fraction of the operating costs of transactional storage with more reliability and performance than offline media. Keeping data online enables it to be repurposed for increased business value while saving at least 75% annually on power and cooling costs in the data center over traditional solutions.

• Migrating your persistent data to Enterprise MAID can equate to massive savings
  Persistent data has aged to a point where it is infrequently changed or modified, but still needs to be retained for future reference or access.  Examples of persistent data are video files, pictures, PowerPoint presentations and emails.  Analysts estimate that between 75-85% of the data stored by the average Fortune 1000 enterprise is persistent data.
  
  
• How COPAN Systems' solution can save you money
  COPAN Systems' Enterprise MAID solution is the only Enterprise storage solution that powers drives off when they are not in use.  This equates to power savings of between 75-90+% compared to other traditional storage vendors.  These vendors are beginning to attempt to mimic the huge benefit COPAN Systems customers are receiving by offering a "spin-down" feature.  In reality this is a manual implementation with a maximum of 19% savings.  A far cry from the incredible savings customers receive with the COPAN Systems solution.

The costs of provisioning new power to a data center is substantial (assuming more power is available from the grid), a COPAN Systems' Enhanced MAID solution significantly reduces the infrastructures costs associated with power and cooling provision, which still needs to be provisioned for a "spin-down" client. These costs can often be higher than the investment in storage itself.

Benefits

• Increased Reliability
• Replication for disaster recovery
• Data protection, data archiving and storage tiering
• Save up to 75% on power and cooling costs
• Save up to 75% in data center floor space

News about Green Storage

Mar 11, 2009		InformationWeek		The Many Shades Of Green...Storage Green storage, or making storage more power efficient, continues to be a hot topic of discussion from storage vendors and for storage consumers. What is interesting and sometimes comical is watching vendors explain how their storage is suddenly green.
Feb 5, 2009		IT Channel Planet		VARs Benefiting from Government's Green IT Push The federal government's green IT mandate to reduce energy consumption leads solution partner Innovative Technology to strike a deal with storage vendor Copan Systems.
Jan 22, 2009		Data Storage Connection		Reducing Energy Use In The Data Center Data center costs are on the increase, from exploding amounts of data to the cost of the electricity required to store it, IT managers need solutions that reduce costs on both sides.
Dec 30, 2008		Computer Technology Review		Getting Ahead of the Data Storage Energy Crisis: The Case for MAID There is a tremendous amount of focus on energy efficiency these days. Some think it’s a nice “green” thing. Others understand the significant financial benefits that can be gained. But for those of us in the storage and networking industry, it’s a lot more urgent than that. We are on the brink of an energy crisis that fundamentally impacts all of our professional lives.
Dec 19, 2008		Processor		Power-Efficient Storage Systems Storage systems consume as much as 24 to 40% of total IT power usage and have become a primary target in green IT initiatives. The challenge is how to create a more power-efficient storage infrastructure while dealing with explosive growth in that storage.
Nov 5, 2008		InformationWeek		Green Data Storage With MAID Data centers use staggering amounts of energy, so it's not surprising nonstandard ways of cutting power consumption are quickly gaining the attention of data center managers.
Oct 31, 2008		Search Storage		Service Provider special: Green storage options To get your customers to their greenest possible posture, you'll need to focus on two key areas: better capacity use and being able to power down or turn off storage.
Oct 6, 2008		The Register		COPAN plugs on with its creaky green revolution What happens if you solve a problem no one cares about?
Sep 4, 2008		eWeek		How to Create an Energy-Efficient Green Data Center Green computing is a hot topic on data center managers’ minds. Using green drives in a green data center can help improve operating efficiencies and reduce overall energy consumption costs. But how can you know that you truly have green drives? Knowledge Center contributor George Crump explains the key components of green drives and how to use them to create the most low-cost, energy-efficient green data center possible.
Jul 3, 2008		Computerworld NZ		New entrant Copan promises energy savings Copan has developed from the ground up what it calls Enterprise MAID
Jan 22, 2008		Enterprise Systems		Getting to Green: PG&E Takes Proactive Steps Is an incentive program the right way to drive increased greenness in storage and server operations?
Aug 13, 2007		Byte & Switch		Getting the Most Out of MAID MAID can bring power savings, but there are plenty of things to consider before deploying it.
Jul 28, 2007		InfoStor		Vendors, users grapple with power concerns Storage systems are major offenders when it comes to power consumption in the data center, but in the quest for energy-efficient technology the focus, at least so far, has been primarily on microprocessors and servers. So why has storage flown under the radar? It could be that, aside from reducing raw capacity, the industry has yet to come up with a clear-cut answer to the problem.
Jun 1, 2007		Greener Computing		CIOs Plugging Into Utilities' Green Leadership Ideas To battle ever rising business energy costs, CIOs are looking for greener data centers. Find out what CIOs are doing to make data centers more energy efficient.
May 24, 2007		Enterprise IT Planet		Green IT: Clean Storage from Copan's MAID The eco-benefits of COPAN's MAID architecture to the problems faced by organizations trying to balance the need for more networked, long term file storage and keeping the data center from becoming too much of a power hog.
May 21, 2007		Network World		Green storage means money saved on power A cornucopia of young technologies promises to snip your storage energy bills by as much as 20% -- without sacrificing performance
Apr 30, 2007		The 451 Group		Copan pitches its idle drives and Power Managed RAID at energy-starved datacenters Power efficiency has become a key sales driver for storage startup Copan Systems
Apr 16, 2007		SNS Europe		COPAN Systems poised to tackle green issues at the root cause with MAID Author: Dana Mallon

COPAN Press Releases on Green Storage

May 22, 2007		COPAN Systems Increases Lead in Data Center Efficiencies Company Leads Industry With Densest, Most Energy-Efficient Subsystems on the Planet, For the Planet
Apr 13, 2007		COPAN Systems' Cool Bytes Enhanced MAID First Storage Platform to Qualify for PG&E Energy Efficiency Incentive for its Customers COPAN's customers to benefit even more from energy-conscious data centers
Apr 11, 2007		COPAN Provides Storage Expertise to Global Data Center Energy Efficiency Effort Joins The Green Grid Consortium to Promote Awareness of Data Center Power and Cooling Issues; Continues Development of Energy Efficient MAID Solutions