Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research's (A*STAR) Data Storage Institute (DSI) and COPAN Systems today signed a Memorandum of Understanding forming a strategic partnership to explore technology innovations in energy saving, power efficient storage systems.
In recent years, the steady growth of data centres has introduced a significant problem: energy consumption. The increasing power requirements are driving energy costs up as much as 25 percent annually and seriously impacting the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a data centre.
The partnership – a first for COPAN Systems in the region - will explore energy saving technologies in storage systems and will see a new COPAN Systems Training Centre set up in collaboration with DSI.
Under the terms of the partnership, COPAN Systems will train DSI researchers on enhanced Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) technology and deploy its storage systems within DSI’s own data centre. DSI will in turn provide its existing heterogeneous infrastructure at the Network Solution Technology (NST) laboratory.
The partnership will combine the advantages of DSI’s vendor-neutral heterogeneous network storage infrastructure with COPAN System’s energy saving enhanced MAID technology.
The COPAN Systems Training Centre will serve the Asia Pacific region, which will accelerate the adoption of energy saving storage systems for archiving purposes. DSI will assist in system setups and demonstrations with COPAN Systems engineers, providing services to the company’s partners for usage of systems and tools and for performance testing, analysis and benchmarking of deployed SAN solutions.
“There are many technologies that need to be considered when applying a ‘green’ approach to any data centre, which include servers, storage, networks and data management tools. As Singapore becomes a data centre hub for Asia Pacific and Japan, we are expecting high electrical energy consumption on an annual basis.” said Prof Chong Tow Chong, Executive Director of DSI.
“As such, a focus on energy saving storage system technology is necessary, while at the same time, through the use of technology, ensuring a high quality level of service. I believe this collaboration will generate positive synergy in this area of research.”
“COPAN Systems is delighted to be collaborating with the Data Storage Institute to raise the awareness of important issues such as energy efficiency and power consumption in the data centre, as well as assist in attracting more R&D and manufacturing activities into Singapore” says Mark Ward, CEO, COPAN Systems.
”The natural synergy between the DSI’s mission to achieve R&D excellence in data storage technologies in Singapore, a nation where 80% of the world’s enterprise hard drives are manufactured, and COPAN Systems’ own goals makes this an important new partnership for us.” |
