Located in Yokohama, Japan, this sophisticated architecture is designed to offer the highest levels of energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent, while also lowering IT management costs.

Hydraulic cooling

Optimised to deliver even greater power efficiencies, the facility also features cutting-edge products that take advantage of Hitachi’s R&D expertise in other key areas of technology. Thermal hydraulic cooling devices, uninterruptible power supply systems and highly advanced power supply converters are designed to work to contribute significant power, cooling and space benefits.

“Within the IT industry, the Wikibon community believes that Hitachi has the most comprehensive and fully implemented corporate green plan in place,” says David Vellante, president and CEO of IT Centrix and co-founder of the Wikibon Project. “Within storage the USP V controller re-designs and the implementation of virtualisation, thin provisioning and support for external devices that spin down, have helped improve utilisation and reduce power consumption by 63% over previous generations,” he added.

The new data centre marks Hitachi’s Harmonious Green Plan and Project CoolCenter50 corporate initiatives which are aimed at reducing 330,000 tons of carbon emissions and cutting down power consumption by as much as 50 per cent by 2012. It is the company’s charter to apply these targets to the product development process across the entire IT solutions portfolio-chief among which include Hitachi Data Systems’ services-oriented storage solutions.

“In today’s climate, we have found that the cost of energy and power has quickly emerged as a growing concern, driving companies to take a deeper look at the efficiency of their data centres,” said Hu Yoshida, vice president and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems.

“IT organisations need to take a holistic approach and carefully examine how every facet of their data centre can play a role in improving their environmental impact-and lowering escalating power consumption levels. By leveraging Hitachi green technology, this breakthrough data centre architecture provides a best practices approach for driving better efficiencies and utilisation in customer environments now and in the future.”

The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and its modular version, the Universal Storage Platform VM, are the only services-oriented storage platform that can equip customers’ existing heterogeneous storage assets with important capabilities they were never designed to deliver in the first place, such as external storage virtualisation and thin provisioning. Not only does the combination of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning and virtualisation provide significant improvements in capacity utilisation, but it also lowers customers’ power and cooling consumption rates.

Storage devices

Organisations therefore require fewer storage devices and ultimately, less electricity and space, which results in immediate improvements to overall storage economics.

The Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage and Workgroup Modular Storage midrange systems deliver breakthrough Power Savings capabilities that enable disc drives to be powered up and powered down as needed-creating a 20 percent cost of operation advantage against competitors. Additionally, the power savings storage service reduces the number of kilowatt-hours, which contributes to reducing cooling costs within a data centre or a computing environment.