The SNIA Emerald™ Program provides information on the energy usage and efficiency of storage systems to End Users. It does this by storage system vendors testing their storage system products according to the methodology of the SNIA Emerald Power Efficiency Measurement Specification and submitting those results to be posted on the SNIA Emerald website which are freely available to the End User community.

With the successful launch of the SNIA Emerald™ Program, we are actively encouraging our SNIA members and all storage vendors to participate in our movement towards a more environmentally friendly and cost effective use of power in storage technologies.

Vendors can test their products and publish the test results through the SNIA Emerald™ Program.

End Users can view and download all published test results through the sniaemerald.com web site. We encourage End Users to ask their storage vendors to publish test results for their products.

The program’s website provides resources and information on the SNIA Emerald testing program, how to participate in the program, and provides the industry at large access to the test results for all products for which tests have been performed and results submitted and accepted for posting.

The program’s website provides resources and information on the SNIA Emerald testing program, how to participate in the program, and provides the industry at large access to the test results for all products for which tests have been performed and results submitted and accepted for posting.

“It is important for the industry at–large to have insight, awareness and agreement on how to best measure a storage device’s energy effectiveness to support a given usage scenario,” said Greg Schulz, StorageIO and author of The Green and Virtual Data Center and Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking. “The SNIA has done significant prep work and test measurement validation to sort through the numerous ways of creating a recipe for success that meets the needs of IT customers, vendors, VARs and service providers. In addition, the SNIA Emerald Program is providing storage providers and IT consumers a consistent and structured framework to review and evaluate the test results.”

The SNIA Green Storage Initiative (GSI) and the SNIA Green TWG will provide training on the SNIA Emerald Power Efficiency Measurement Specification at the SNIA Winter Symposium.

This training session will cover the basics of the specification and ways to find the best configuration to use for power efficiency measurements. Also covered will be the minimum data needed for data submission to the SNIA Emerald™ Program. It is important for developers of storage systems to understand the power efficiency measurement specification and system tradeoffs since the measurement specification is referenced by ENERGY STAR® for Data Center Storage.

SNIA GSI and Green TWG is continuing its active involvement with the ENERGY STAR® for Data Center Storage development process by submitting its response to the United States EPA on it second draft of the specification. Through this partnership SNIA is a voice for the storage industry in the development of the ENERGY STAR® specification to make it a meaningful specification for the storage network industry and its customers.

“The EPA ENERGY STAR program is very supportive of the SNIA work on the storage system taxonomy and the test measurement methods contained within the SNIA Emerald Power Efficiency Measurement Specification,” said Robert J. Meyers, Data Center Products Lead, EPA ENERGY STAR. “They form an excellent starting point in the industry effort to understand and improve storage system energy efficiency. Additionally, the data generated using the Emerald test method will help drive a wider industry discussion on energy efficiency, testing methods, and efficiency metrics.”