Western Digital Corp. recently announced its new environmentally friendly, energy-conscious GreenPower family of enterprise hard drive products. The new WD RE2 GreenPower family offers capacities of 500 gigabytes (GB), 750 GB and one terabyte (TB), and provides data-hungry organizations with a money-saving solution to combat the challenges faced in the enterprise IT sector, such as, total available drive slots, maximum capacity, and available power and budget. Addressing a growing high-capacity enterprise market, WD RE2 drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 mln hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments.
“Delivering up to 40% savings in hard drive power consumption, Western Digital’s new RE2-GP hard drives are an excellent choice for customers deploying Rackable Systems’ newest generation of Eco-Logical storage systems — enabling even greater efficiency and performance,†said Tony Gaughan, chief products officer of Rackable Systems.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s August 2007 report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency data centers consumed an estimated 1.5% of the nation’s energy in 2006 (equivalent to 61 bln Kilowatt-hours or $4.5 bln). Furthermore, the agency stated, if left unchecked, data center power consumption will threaten to cost the public and private sectors $7.4 bln in annual electricity costs by 2011.
Fully appreciating the storage-energy dilemma, each WD RE2-GP hard drive consumes an average of 4-5 watts less than competitive hard drives, making it possible for energy-conscious enterprise customers to build servers and storage subsystems with higher capacities, consistent performance, and assured reliability, all while promoting energy conservation. By WD estimates, under typical workloads, the new WD RE2-GP drives will save more than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. Consequently, a large data center with 10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs.
Other 1 TB hard drives typically consume power as high as 13.5 watts. Replacing these drives with WD RE2-GP hard drives will reduce overall annual energy costs, not only through the reduction of drive power consumption, but also through reduced heat and the associated expense of environmental climate controls. To view various needs for a data center, click on WD’s GreenPower calculator for enterprise customers at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/greenpower/estimator.asp
WD RE2-GP 500 GB drives, 750 GB drives and the 1 TB drives are available from the company’s online store (www.shopwd.com). MSRP is $149.99, $249.99 and $349.99 respectively.
