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Overview Power Conservation Environmental Certifications
Power Conservation

Key Points:
  • FlexVol®, FlexClone®, Snapshot™, and deduplication products help you realize a dramatic increase in storage utilization
  • Member of The Green Grid, a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to improve energy efficiency in data centers around the globe

NetApp is an industry leader in the conservation of power and other resources in the data center.

Efficient Storage Saves Power, Cooling, and Space
Most IT organizations are experiencing exponential data growth and a resulting need for more storage. The traditional approach of just adding more disks and storage systems can satisfy the demand. However, there will be a proportional increase in requirements for power, cooling, and space, which will eventually bump up against data center limits.

Many IT professionals are already struggling with a hard limit on available power in the data center: "To put a watt in, I must take a watt out." In other cases, the primary constraint may be floor space or air conditioning.

Most storage vendors can reduce power consumption by consolidating data onto fewer systems with higher-capacity hard disk drives. Our approach goes well beyond consolidation by applying proprietary technology–FlexVol®, FlexClone®, Snapshot™, and deduplication–to dramatically increase storage utilization.

Oliver Wyman (formerly Mercer Management Consulting) quantifies the benefits of using efficient storage in the white paper "Making Green IT a Reality: Customer Perspectives on the Impact of Storage Vendor Decisions on Power, Cooling, and Space in Enterprise Data Centers." (PDF)

Designing Data Centers for Efficiency
At NetApp, we go beyond storage innovation by working aggressively to make our own data centers as efficient as possible with a resulting savings of 40,000 kWh per month. In addition, storage utilization has been increased from less than 40% to an average of 60% by using NetApp FlexVol technology for thin provisioning. Our newest data center, in North Carolina, is expected to achieve a remarkable power-to-cooling ratio of 1 to 0.25. We share our methods in the report "Ten Techniques for Improving Data Center Power Efficiency." (PDF)

The Green Grid
The Green Grid organization charter is to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes, and new technologies to improve energy-efficient performance of global data centers. Our membership highlights our commitment to helping you reduce your energy footprint.

Discover more about NetApp’s commitment to power conservation by reading our eight-point plan for reducing data center power consumption through efficient storage white paper (PDF).