Energy-Efficient Products and Services

Energy efficiency in the data center is both a business and an environmental issue. Around the world, data centers are reaching capacity on power and floor space and facing ever higher energy costs. At the same time, corporations are working to reduce environmental impact by reducing energy consumption.

EMC designs all of its products to operate in an energy-efficient manner. This principle manifests itself in EMC’s power-efficient storage platforms, hardware-enabled power controls, software-controlled power optimization, and power-aware information management.

As a result, EMC's energy-efficiency advantages in hardware, software, and services are helping customers simultaneously meet business needs and honor environmental commitments. In the design and operation of its own data centers, EMC applies the same level of knowledge, best practices, and energy-efficient technology.

Reducing energy use in the data center

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, data center managers can reduce energy use by as much as 55 percent by using currently available technology and adopting best practices. EMC systems and software deliver energy efficiency, performance, and manageability that reduce capital and operating expenses as well as business continuity risks. By reducing the amount of electricity required to operate, the environmental impact is reduced as well. 

History of energy efficiency

In 1989, EMC launched the Orion energy-efficient mainframe storage system. In the early 1990s, EMC first incorporated 5 1/4” disk drives in the Symmetrix product family. The smaller drives were an innovative, more efficient alternative at a time when SLEDs (single large expensive disks), which were the size of an automobile tire, were the standard for information storage. With innovations like these, EMC has for almost two decades been meeting its customers' critical service levels for availability and performance, while at the same time responding to power consumption and floor space concerns. 

Product development

Today, EMC's E3 Team, a cross-functional group of engineers, drives energy efficiency across EMC’s product lines. The team examines the entire system of information storage and management, from power supplies and cooling systems to disk drives, software algorithms, and interfaces. This collaboration across product groups results in new features on the product roadmap and a holistic approach to energy efficiency across the product portfolio.

Power-efficient platforms

Developments in EMC's power-efficient storage systems include:

• Solid-state (Flash) drives in the EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 family and EMC CLARiiON CX4. These drives use up to 38 percent less energy per terabyte than the standard mechanical drives, and perform up to 30 times faster.
• Adaptive cooling, which saves energy by adjusting blower and fan speeds to a storage system’s temperature, available in the EMC Centera LP and CLARiiON CX4.
• Virtual provisioning capabilities extended to CLARiiON and Symmetrix systems.
• Data deduplication implemented in Celerra and EMC Disk Library.
• Drive spin-down capability, which saves energy when information is not in use.

To help customers understand potential energy efficiency gains, EMC’s Power Calculator accurately estimates the power consumption and cooling requirements of EMC system configurations, as well as the system’s weight, floor space, and sound levels.

Maximizing efficiency with software

EMC’s software maximizes the energy efficiency benefits of storage platforms. Virtualization, consolidation, and optimization with EMC software allow storage platforms to run at high utilization without performance degradation.

As a result, customers experience greater energy and operational efficiency, resulting in lower costs and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from electricity consumption. For example, VMware virtualization solutions can reduce energy costs by as much as 80 percent. File deduplication, in combination with compression technology, enables an average of 30 to 40 percent storage savings. By reducing the initial over-allocation of storage capacity, Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning dramatically improves the total cost of ownership.

Services

EMC’s role goes beyond product development to assisting customers with the best possible configurations for their data centers. Our Consulting Services organization educates our customers on individual product efficiencies and how best to use them together in a holistic approach for maximum effectiveness. As a result, our customers have simplified data centers that meet their business needs while reducing their energy costs and associated GHG emissions.

This careful data center environment and usage model analysis informs subsequent recommendations for hardware, software, and physical structure. The EMC Remote Managed Services group, for example, enables customers to optimize information management using intelligent remote monitoring that, in turn, can improve their operational efficiencies.