September 8th, 2008
Adaptec adds custom power management to its RAID products
Adaptec has integrated a utility called Intelligent Power Management into its Series 5 and Series 2 Unified Serial RAID controllers.
The software allows a systems integrator, OEM or IT manager to configure disks to run in one of three states:
Normal Operation, which provides full power and full revolutions per minute (RPM)
Standby, which is a low-power mode that spins the disks at a lower RPM rate
Power-Off Mode, which means the disks aren’t spinning at all
If you want, you can disable the power management function entirely, so there’s no question of the disks being able to react quickly during periods of peak IT activity. Different banks of drives can be configured or scheduled to operate in different power states.
Adaptec figures that custom-configured storage using its new utility can be configured to use up to 70 percent less power than those that haven’t been optimized in this way. Adaptec Intelligent Power Management supports 122 disk drives from five leading vendors. The company’s official “green” partners include Seagate Technology, Western Digital, Supermicro, AIC, Chenbro and Rorke Data.
Here are two examples of the impact that Adaptec’s software can have:
- When used with a Seagate Barracuda ES SATA drive, power consumption was reduced by 70 percent to 2.2 watts in Power-Off mode, compared with 8.6 watts in Normal Operation mode.
- With a Hitachi Ultrastar SAS drive, the Adaptec Intelligent Power Management utility reduced power by 73 percent to 4.4 watts in Power-Off Mode, compared with 16.7 watts in Normal Operation mode.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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