Green Storage Technology for The Cloud

Cutting Edge Networked Storage, the manufacturing partner for Esri's Windows and Linux based turnkey servers to the geospatial information systems (GIS) community, has debuted their new green storage technology for the cloud in Booth 1216 at the Esri International User Conference, held 11th to 16th June 2011 in San Diego.

The Power Saving Cloud Archive (PSCA) is a cost-effective, flexible high-density multi-tiered storage solution that boasts extremely high performance and scalability, low acquisition cost, up to 90% power savings and a new low in total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) for organisations that are struggling to address the relentless flood of unstructured data, and longer retention times and at the same time trying to keep capital and operating expenses low. Moreover, PSCA is the ideal solution for today's power-hungry storage environments where the cost to provide power and cooling for storage systems now actually exceeds the cost to acquire the equipment being powered and cooled.

According to industry analysts such as IDC and Gartner, as much as 75-80% of data now being generated consists of unstructured file formats. Contributing to this trend are applications such as video surveillance, GIS systems, video-on-demand, medical imaging, and scientific computing & analysis, as well as the relentless worldwide explosion of user-generated information.

The Power Saving Cloud Archive architecture directly addresses this trend, seamlessly integrating fifth-generation EdgeWareTM unified storage software and multi-tiered archiving in combination with innovative power-saving hardware to deliver high-density, scalable storage to multiple Petabytes that reduces power consumption for file-based long-tailed data (such as video, images, medical images, etc.) by up to 90%.

The Power Saving Cloud Archive leverages an open-systems approach (based on Linux Open Source Software) that optimises the EdgeWare software for unified storage related functions. EdgeWare has been designed from its inception to provide high-performance, adaptability and scalability to a Petabyte of data within a single rack, which is equivalent to 2,000 hours of uncompressed high-definition video footage. Storage can be infinitely extended simply by adding new nodes and racks, offering and incremental growth path that further improves PSCA's TCO advantage.