Comments on: ONStor Claims that Cougar Storage features Power and Cooling Efficiency

By: thehotaisle

thehotaisle — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:22:32 +0000

Bob

That is a very good point except that if the disk hasn't been spun up for a while then the data ought to have been backed up then all we see is a delay to fixing the problem. A high performance disk will use a Mega Watt hour of electricity in it's lifetime (including cooling etc.. at a PUE of 2.5). That makes not spinning down disks rather expensive.

Steve

By: thehotaisle

thehotaisle — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:22:32 +0000

By: Storage_Bob

Storage_Bob — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:45:49 +0000

I must disagree with the notion that spinning down hard disks to conserve power is a “good” think. Hard disks do only three things in their lifetime: read, write and die. You hope that it doesn't do the last one before you've had time to make a backup. With current technology, you only know if a drive is good while it's spinning. Once it's spun down, you never know if it will ever spin up again. COPAN doesn't actually solve that problem, i.e. guarantee 100% that the drive will spin up again. Their patented disk aerobics are to confirm the SHA hash and checksums before you spin down the drive – it does nothing to “repair” a failed drive. Even Seagate's secret sauce in the Xiotech ISE won't guarantee 100% recovery in a failed case.

By: thehotaisle

thehotaisle — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:11:09 +0000

Yes the bulk of the power used is in the disks hence my comment about Copan. Nevertheless the ONStor uses 2.1KW less power than an equivalent NetApp, that is significant – as per the math in the article.

Steve

By: thehotaisle

thehotaisle — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:11:09 +0000

Steve

By: RZB

RZB — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:34:35 +0000

I think that we need to re-think this a bit.

ONStor power saving is minimal as the ‘low power’ design relates only to the controller chassis. The difference is X86 architecture vs MIPS RISC….perhaps 100 watts difference in total controller power consumption for the equivalent performance.
Other features such as fan speed control and the controller operational temperature range seem to be much the same.

The bulk of power consumption is still in the disks and the associated JBOD chassis …. and it will be much like any other competitive system. Disks will require much the same operational environment on all systems and require stabilized temperature environment.

Having said that… architecturally, the ONStor is a nice system.