This week, when you go to the Web site of Seagate Technology, the leading maker of storage products (and a client of Washburn Communication), and watch the banner at the top of the page, you'll soon see mention of "New breakthroughs in power reduction technology," followed by "Get power savings without sacrificing performance." The sequence ends with "Energy-efficient storage solutions from 
Seagate" and offers links to three product pages. You also find a "Think Green" logo that includes visual allusions to a spinning hard disk drive (really a component of the Seagate company logo) and the coiled appearance of the most commonly used energy-efficient light bulbs.
The three hard drive families listed are the Barracuda® ES, the Cheetah®, and the Savvio®. When you navigate to the three product pages, you find that these drives feature Seagate PowerTrim™ technology, said to help reduce power costs, increase "power-to-storage efficiency," and improve "IOPS/Watt performance." That last item would relate to the relationship of data transactions performed by the hard drive and the electrical power it requires for that task. The Think Green logo appears next to the product descriptions. When you click on it, you get to a recently added Products and the Environment page, nested within the Global Citizenship section under About Seagate.
"Seagate® is committed to being your environmentally friendly storage technology company. Seagate hard drives are produced with the environment in mind, including but not limited to low power consumption. Seagate has in place production efficiencies that minimize energy use, including equipment design optimization, facility retrofitting, and energy-wise process improvements. These efforts reduced electricity (kWh) used per drive in manufacturing by 17% in FY2007, and continue to drive reductions today. Additionally, at all Seagate facilities, varied programs are underway to reduce energy use and enhance our environment through measures like recycling, tree planting, commuting solutions, etc.
"By providing hard drives that require lower power, Seagate hard drives enable storage solutions that allow companies to run greener systems which generate a better return on technology investment, and maintain or accelerate storage performance. In doing so, Seagate facilitates a unique convergence of environmental and business benefits."
Seagate, in my experience, markets responsibly almost to a fault and never seems to overstate its accomplishments. I hope that somebody at the company finds the time to tell us more about the many environmental activities Seagate employees participate in, as well as Seagate's good green practices in manufacturing and distribution. It would also be great to have more detail on how that PowerTrim technology works, although the second-tier brands of the storage market are eagerly hoping for that information as well, I'm sure.
If you're interested in data storage and environmental issues or need to educate yourself so that you can understand what storage green marketing needs to consider, take a look at the Green Storage pages under the somewhat confusingly named Greendatastorage.com, a site that discusses data center issues, including storage, more broadly. StorageIO group offers these informative pages with lots of useful tools. I don't mean to single this resource out (and there are many just like it), but it's not untypical for the industry: much good information if you dig a little, but offered in a presentation that is strictly utilitarian and could use some editorial and designer touches.
Environmentally smart data storage can indeed save vast resources and reduce the impact of data centers and hardware manufacturers on the planet. And, considering the critical, savvy audience of IT business pros who need to review products and claims, there's almost no room for green-washing in this area.
