Well, I have just about had it with “Green”. Why? Too much hype. Everyone on the planet is running around explaining why their products are “green”, including Pillar.

So if you are buying storage, who should you believe? What’s real, and what is just a load of crap?

Here are a few observations regarding all the Green Noise out there regarding storage systems:

1. If you want to save power, use the capacity you own. Don’t allow 60% of it to sit there spoken for, but not used (Thin Provisioning) along with technology that allows performance expectations to be met when the disk is full…

2. If your storage system performance falls apart as you fill the disk – consider Pillar Axiom – it is designed to give great performance when it is highly utilized, even as high as 85%.

3. If you can use SATA 7200 RPM disk for an application instead of FC, use it, it is roughly half the power of FC 15K RPM disk.

4. If you can use de-duplication to keep from wasting a lot of space, use it.

5. If you can use 1TB disk for applications versus 500GB or 750GB, use it. The higher the capacity the better in terms of Watts/GB. Use the biggest drives you can, unless you need spindles for IOPS and cannot afford the higher capacity models.

6. If you need some small databases with relatively high IO requirements, consider sharing the spindles from a disk-to-disk backup solution, a VTL solution, or any other giving high priority to the database. Pillar’s QoS will allow you to parcel out IO’s from all those spindles you own to applications that need the IO but not the capacity, and Thinly provision the capacity to the applications that are data hogs. Array sharing is green, and without the drawbacks one normally encounters with non Application Aware systems.

7. Turn the lights off when you aren’t in the room.

8. Let Boise-Cascade plant trees, your storage company is probably not the best way to reforest the planet.

People seem to want to say anything to claim they are green. I commit that we will use our engineers, and efforts to work on this problem. Buying carbon credits is a nice gesture, but for god sake it is not the best way to tackle this problem.