What is the SNIA Emerald Program?

The SNIA Emerald Program is a non-profit program founded to define, standardize, and promote storage subsystem energy efficiency measurements as well as to disseminate objective, verifiable energy efficient data to the storage industry and its customers. The goal of this program is to serve as a catalyst for energy efficiency improvement in storage subsystems. It works to foster the free and open exchange of ideas and information, and driving vendors to improve their products and services available to the general public. In support of its goals the SNIA Emerald Program developed a measurement specification focusing on the energy efficiency of storage subsystems. These subsystems include taxonomy categories covered in the first release of the SNIA Emerald Power Efficiency Measurement Specification.

The SNIA Emerald Program is also focused on expanding the recognition and use of its energy measurement specification as well as publicizing those results. As a result, customers will be able to more accurately assess the energy metrics of storage products prior to acquisition. Although anyone can run the measurement specification, for them to be disseminated and adopted within the industry, published results must successfully complete a SNIA Emerald Program audit for accuracy and authenticity to be listed as a certified result.

The motivation for the SNIA Emerald Program is to address concerns of IT equipment users of all kinds that wish to make their IT operations as energy efficient as possible. This priority can be driven by one or more of several requirements:

• Rising energy costs have made power and cooling expenses a more significant percentage of total cost of ownership of server and storage equipment.
  
  
• Some data centers are physically unable to add more power and cooling load, which means that new applications and data can only be brought on if old ones are retired or consolidated onto new, more efficient configurations.
  
  
• Increased regulatory and societal pressures provide incentives for companies to lower their total energy footprints. For many companies, IT is a significant portion of overall energy consumption, and corporate Green goals can only be achieved by reducing IT’s energy needs or by making operations more efficient.
  
  

Why use the Emerald Program?

…As a vendor?

The SNIA Emerald Program, run by the SNIA Green Storage Initiative, strategic objectives are: to empower storage vendors to build better products, and to stimulate the IT community to more rapidly trust and deploy multi-vendor storage networking technology efficiently. In support, this program is the only non-profit corporation that defines, standardizes, and promotes storage subsystem energy efficiency as its primary metric as well as disseminates objective, relevant and verifiable energy efficient data and related test tools to the storage industry and its customers. This program is designed to:

• Provide a level playing field for test sponsors.
  
  
• Produce results that are powerful and yet simple to use.
  
  
• Provide value for engineers as well as IT consumers and solution integrators.
  
  
• Report official results in an easy to run, audit/verify, and use.
  
  

…As a consumer?

IT equipment users will seek advice on the most energy efficient approach to getting their work done. It is not practical for customers to test a wide range of storage products and architectures for themselves. A more effective approach is to create a collection of standard metrics that allow IT architects to objectively compare a range of possible solutions. This objective, metric-based approach has a dual impact:

• Users can select the mode of storage usage that accomplishes their work objectives with the lowest overall energy consumption.
  
  
• Companies will be driven to innovate and compete in the development of energy efficient products as measured by the standard yardsticks.
  
  

About the SNIA

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of some 400 member companies and 7,000 individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA's mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards, technologies, and educational services to empower organizations in the management of information. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education, and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at www.snia.org.