With the price of energy surging, a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research's Data Storage Institute (DSI) and Copan Systems ( www.copansystems.com ) certainly comes at the right time.

The partnership – a first for Copan Systems in the region - will explore technology innovations that result in power-efficient storage systems and will see a new Copan Systems Training Centre set up in collaboration with DSI.

Prof Chong: As Singapore becomes a data centre hub, high electrical energy consumption can be expected.

Copan Systems produces storage solutions for protecting and managing persistent data. Under the terms of the partnership, the company will train DSI researchers on its 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 laboratory.

MAID operates on the principle that when persistent data is stored on drives, one would not need all drives to spin all the time. Instead, only those drives that contain data that is requested by a specific application are powered on, and then are powered off when they are not needed. Copan’s proprietary software provides a maximum of 25 per cent of drives powered on with assurances on drive health and data integrity, an 85 per cent savings in power and cooling, and an 85 per cent reduction in data centre floor space.

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 storage area network solutions.

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 per cent annually and seriously impacting the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a data centre.

"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,” said Prof Chong Tow Chong, Executive Director of DSI. “As Singapore becomes a data centre hub for Asia Pacific and Japan, we are expecting high electrical energy consumption on an annual basis. As such, a focus on energy saving storage system technology is necessary… I believe this collaboration will generate positive synergy in this area of research.”