Energy costs

[Jeff Boucher]

Good morning (he says ingesting a large coffee...),
Has there been any information on 'green' ways to run an in office archive system (JBOD or other), and/or the least expensive setups? With energy prices going up, I'm wondering if burning dvd's might carry the least overhead........
I realize overhead would also include time/efficiency to access files etc. Just wondering if there has been discussion on this yet.
Cheers
Jeff

[peterkrogh]

Jeff, it's a topic I touch on lightly in the book. By using a JBOD, rather than RAID, you can "spin down" drives that you don't use as much, in order to save drive life and energy costs.

I seems, however, that a Firewire JBOD does not provide much in this regard, since it appears (on my system, at least) that all drives are spinning when any drives in the chain are spinning.  This is a good argument for an SATA JBOD, since you should have greater control over each drive (since each is on its own bus).

DVD could also be a solution, but I think that the workflow hassles of using DVD as primary storage are too big a hassle to overcome.
Peter

[Nat]

Jeff,  I'm not being facetious, but with your concerns about energy consumption (which are absolutely realistic!), you might consider looking into PV solar panels.  We're in the process of building a new office space and we're putting solar panels on the roof AND the state of New Jersey is picking up 70% of the cost, plus there's a 2K rebate from the federal gov, plus here in Jersey they have "net metering" where you sell electricity to the utility when you're generating more than you're using.
Nat

[peterkrogh]

Nat,
I like that approach...
Now that our "addiction to oil" has finally been made public, maybe we can have a little more focus on issues like this.  Too bad we didn't spend that 500 billion dollars on alternative energy research BEFORE the administration realized that the mideast was inherently unstable...

D'oh!

To go back to the original question, I fully expect to see some good developments here, there's just too much money to be made on better solutions.  I'm sure that we will all look back on the days of HD storage in the same kind of "isn't that quaint" way we look back at the golden age of syquest or zip drive storage.
Peter

Peter