Santa
Announces Green Server SSD Initiative
Texas Memory Systems SSD to reduce power consumption and heat at
Santa's North Pole Data Center
story by Agnes Lamont, MarketingSage |
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At this time of
year
Megabyte was happy
to forsake dignity and go with the flow. | | |
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North Pole - December 2, 2008 -
Texas Memory Systems
and Santa, the world's leading
distributor of children's toys, today announced an initiative to replace all
monolithic RAID storage at
the North Pole with energy efficient and super fast
solid state disks by the
end of 2009.
This proactive move is expected to reduce the energy
required to process the "Naughty or Nice" lists by up to 50%.
As the world population has increased beyond 6.6 billion, Santa has
seen a corresponding increase in the demand for his services. With only 32 days
between Thanksgiving and Christmas, an estimated 154 million toy orders must be
processed daily. This means database performance is mission-critical.
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"Few people stop to
consider just how daunting the logistics of our operation are," said Ms.
Elf, senior executive vp of worldwide sales at Santa (Global) Enterprises. "Most
orders come from letters. Each letter must be entered into the database, and
then cross-referenced with naughty-or-nice lists. With an average of 3 toys for
an estimated 1.65 billion children, the old
hard disk-based RAID
systems just couldn't cope with the number of transactions."
Santa chose the RamSan-500
cached flash solid state device to replace his hard disk drives. The RamSan-500
is up to 16x faster than hard disk-based storage systems and requires only 50%
of the power, so it saves energy and runs cooler.
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"The RamSan is fast, but
it also runs cooler than hard disk drive systems," said a
storage analyst
familiar with the deal. "Lower heat emission was an important factor in the
decision to use the RamSan because heat from the racks' hard drives, coupled
with global warming, was starting to damage the foundations of Santa's North
Pole data center. It was getting wet in there."
The switch to the Texas Memory Systems' RamSan-500 SSD is just one of
several initiatives announced by Santa to address the global warming concerns
expressed about his operation.
In a statement made on the same day as
President-elect
Obama's
"green-collar jobs" initiative - Santa announced that he
would no longer distribute carbon-based coal to naughty children. When pressed
by anxious parents afraid of losing what little leverage they have over their
children, Santa's PR manager said that the coal would be replaced by disabled
hard disk drives as part of a "new recycling program." ...Texas Memory Systems
profile, Disk
Sanitizers, Green
Storage - Trends and Predictions
Editor's comments:- the
advantages of SSDs in server acceleration have been well documented before in
numerous SSD articles
and case studies. |
However, the risks /
opportunities posed by melting ice in the North Pole region are ambiguous.
In 1912 the famous liner
Titanic was sunk
as a result of encountering ice packs at night while cruising at high speed.
But ask yourself this question... If all the ice had already melted - would the
outcome have been better for the passengers?
Much less well known is
the strange case of the 18th century pirates who fired a broadside at a
nuclear submarine recently when they thawed out (after being
trapped in an iceberg for
200 years.)
About Santa
Santa, the world's leading distributor of
children's toys, uses proprietary methods to deliver gifts to 1.65 billion
children across 24 time zones globally in just one night. Now based at The North
Pole, Santa was inspired by the 4th century Saint Nicholas of Myra to give free
gifts to all "nice" children.
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