Western Digital Corp has launched environmentally-friendly, energy-conscious GreenPower family of WD Enterprise hard drive products.

The new WD RE2 GreenPower (GP) family offers capacities of 500 gigabytes (GB), 750 GB and one terabyte (TB), and provides data-hungry organisations 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, the company said in a statement.

Addressing a growing high-capacity enterprise market, WD RE2 drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments, the company said in a statement.

“Delivering up to 40 percent 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 Rackable Systems chief products officer Tony Gaughan.

WD RE2-GP hard drives are designed with power savings as the primary attribute.  The WD RE2-GP hard drives offer massive capacity with significant power savings and lower total cost of ownership compared to other competitive enterprise-class drives, the company said.

“Verari Systems is dedicated to protecting the environment by providing data centre solutions that are engineered for maximum power efficiency,” said Verari Systems chief technology officer David Driggers. “By utilising WD’s latest GreenPower technology, Verari is able to provide enterprise customers with a solution that delivers one of the most energy-efficient systems available today.”

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s August 2007 report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency , data centres consumed an estimated 1.5 per cent of the Nation’s energy in 2006 (equivalent to 61 billion Kilowatt-hours or $4.5 billion). Furthermore, the agency stated, if left unchecked, data centre power consumption will threaten to cost the public and private sectors $7.4 billion 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, the company said in a statement.

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 centre 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. – TradeArabia News Service