Among the most power hungry hardware components inside a computer system, be it laptop, mainframe, server or desktop, is the data storage subsystem that received little or no attention concerning the implementation of power saving features and energy efficiency policies. Now, it is time to change that situation and have more green storage in our systems. The Storage Networking Industry Association, or SNIA for short, wants to catch the green wave head on and so it has set up a group to address the possibility of more greener storage devices.

Jürgen Arnold, SNIA Europe's chairman, said that while there are plenty of information sources about green computing all over the hardware industry, most end users like companies and data centers find it hard to implement a coherent "go green" strategy because it is often difficult to get enough information about what exactly has to be done in order to optimize efficiency and keep a low energy and carbon footprint.

According to the news site The Register, Jürgen Arnold recommended the Green Grid initiative as a good starting point because this work group was founded by the biggest names in the computer industry, covering both the hardware and the software components. Among the Green Grid members there are AMD, Intel, Microsoft and Sun, all big names in their particular field but SNIA's chairman said that maybe a less vendor and manufacturer independent advice is sometimes recommended, as there are a lot of additional technologies like thin provisioning and tape archiving that are never mentioned. "SNIA recently formed the SNIA Green Storage Task Force and a Green Storage Technical Working Group to provide organisations with vendor-independent information," he said. "As a result, the association has already started delivering a tutorial to help IT professionals better understand this topic".

Even if the storage system in a computer is one of the biggest energy consumers, it is not by any means the only one, but if SNIA's claims of addressing a larger green issues come to fruition, it may still mean a big leap ahead.