COPAN Systems, a data center infrastucture provider, yesterday announced that it has joined The Green Grid, seeking to lower the overall power consumption of data centers around the globe by developing best practices for improving energy consumption.

COPAN Systems, whose products have been designed to address power consumption issues, joins as a contributing member-level storage company. The low power requirements of COPAN's Enhanced MAID architecture combined with the dense storage capacity delivers an impressive 91 TB of capacity per KW consumed. This compares to an average power density for Fibre Channel disk products of approx. 4 TB per KW and an average rate for standard SATA disk products of 17 TB per KW, says the company.

"Power consumption levels in the data center are at an unprecedented high, and will only increase," said Roger Archibald, senior vice president of Marketing and Business Development for COPAN Systems. "Soon, data center managers will be seeing up to 40 percent of their total budget attributed just to energy. Storage alone already consumes more than 30 percent of the total energy in a typical enterprise data center. The explosion of persistent data, or data that is retained for long periods of time, compounds this problem, as customers continue to add more and more capacity to manage it."