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The Greening of Blue
With so many manufacturers—across all industries—frantically "greenwashing" their existing products in order to claim environmental friendliness, it is encouraging to uncover the few that have actually done something different to justify their "green" credentials. Simply "painting" an existing product does not constitute a "green" approach! BlueArc stands as an excellent example of planned and executed differentiation. Though we at ESG have a healthy skepticism towards the enthusiasm demonstrated by the storage industry's marketing departments for all things "green," we are very positive about the potential for significant improvements in some of the basic measurable things that really matter to many data center managers—specifically, the usage of power, cooling and space (which we refer to as PCSE: Power, Cooling and Space Efficiency. See the sidebar "ESG's position on Green"). From its beginnings, BlueArc clearly understood that there was room for improvement in these areas, while refusing to give up one iota on its main goal of delivering exceptional performance.
Bucking the Architectural Trend
Let's start with a review of how things (in this case, storage "controllers" or "gateways"—depending on whether you're on the block or file side of the house) have typically been developed. Since the underlying platform architectures are still often pursued within the industry (interestingly, the same general track has applied to IP router development), a brief reminder is merited. The accepted historical approach has been that you have a "data traffic director"—a hardware/software combination—in front of a number of hard disk drives. More specifically, over the years this "controller" or "gateway" functionality has initially been placed on what was basically an off-the-shelf CPU (plus memory and an I/O bus) repurposed to run the data control, flow and placement inherent to a storage system. Over time, purpose-built servers were leveraged with operating systems that were more specific to the needs of storage. It was better, but it was still a server approach. Like much that has developed in IT, it was a quick and practical route at the time and—even though it was probably not optimum in hindsight—it became “just the way it is”… the rule, if you like. And it was this rule (among others that are outside the scope of this paper) that BlueArc set out to change. Rather than starting with what had gone before, BlueArc considered what was actually needed to provide the necessary gateway (in this case, a NAS implementation) functionality—and thus, the next step in its evolution was to embed NAS services in a hardware accelerated architecture built on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology to optimize both performance and efficiency gains. In very simple terms, this approach can be regarded as having stripped out what you don't need so that all that is left is a set of dedicated, purpose-built ASICs to manage the storage system. While the engineering design criteria focused on bandwidth and throughput, the environmental benefits of this approach were also important and impressive—for example, using just 66MHz to power the control function, rather than the GHz required in traditional CPU-based controllers. This makes the BlueArc's Titan very efficient in terms of PCSE.
ESG’s Position on ‘Green’ – Focus on ‘PCSE’
There is a lot of messaging around "green" these days. Indeed, with global-warming as a top item on public and private agendas everywhere, it is hard to avoid. Everything from aircraft to zoos claims some green aspect or endeavor. And, like everyone, we applaud these efforts—if things can be done with a reduced negative impact on our planet, then that's clearly a good thing. Every small step counts. "Green is good". And the IT infrastructure suppliers know it too.
Consequently, with electricity prices and consumption heading upwards, almost all storage vendors are chasing the "green_ mantle. However, while this may be right and good in general, the implied altruism is also somewhat misleading. There are no real green storage products; although certainly some are significantly less bad than others. And, as yet, there are few end-users making buying decisions purely on "green-ness". At ESG, we assert that most IT departments are realistically not currently highly focused on being "green".
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