Infocomm Indonesia

Typically, storage systems were designed to retrieve data for applications as fast as possible. That’s why these systems use high speed disks that spin tens of thousands revolutions per minute (rpm). High speed disks require a great deal of energy, more cooling that end up with fat electricity bills.

The problem is, energy consumption for running storage systems are the same regardless of the application it support. You pay the same amount of money. In backup and archive or virtual tape library applications, data is accessed occasionally. So there is no need for the disk to keep spinning at high speed and consume lots of energy.

Storage maker Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) recently came up with a technology that enable storage systems to spin drives up and down according to application needs. The system can power down disks when not being accessed by a business application, then powered up quickly when the application requires them. This ability might be ideal for healthcare companies which store infrequently accessed data such as patient medical record.

This flexible speed technology is part of enhancements HDS made for its midrange line of product: the Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) and Workgroup Modular Storage (WMS). Another enhancements is support for 750 gigabyte SATA II drives and a handful of new security features.

AMS and WMS now equipped with Audit Logging and Role-Based Access (RBA) capabilities. Audit Logging store history performed on the system and can be centralized to simplify audit and control management tasks. Moreover the logging system can work with existing logging infrastructure and compliant with industry standard protocol (BSD Syslog Protocol - RFC3164).

Meanwhile, RBA feature enables separation of access level according to individual profile. There are three level of access: account administrator, storage administrator and auditor which restrict the storage management functions available to that user based on their specific profile. Each user has a unique login and password which limits the user to one of the three different management roles.

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