Anti-Vibration HDD Rack by Start-Up Green Platform

Green Platform, a Silicon Valley start-up that is developing new anti-vibration technologies that improve equipment performance, announced the results of an independent study that shows how an anti-vibration storage rack can double the random read performance of hard disk drives. The results were revealed at the USENIX SustainIT 10 conference in a paper, The Effects of Data Center Vibration on Compute System Performance, by Julian Turner, CTO at Q-Associates USA.

The paper shows the results of comparative testing between Green Platform’s AVR-1000 Anti-Vibration Rack and a standard steel rack. The AVR-1000 uses carbon fiber and other advanced composites to mitigate vibration across the critical frequency range that impacts disk-based storage systems. As a result, the AVR-1000 eliminates the ‘Vibration Penalty’ that affects hard disk-based systems in standard steel racks under normal levels of data center vibration.

Storage performance has been a long-standing bottleneck for IT users. Even though storage capacity has grown enormously, read/write performance has not kept pace. Data center operators have been forced to add disk drives for performance reasons rather than for capacity needs, or to use other strategies like smaller platters, SSD caching and short-stroking to gain faster access to data.

The AVR 1000 Anti-Vibration Rack mitigates harmful vibration to the operation of disk-based storage systems resulting in faster seek and read/write times. "Steel racks permit vibration, but ours don’t," said Gus Malek-Madani, CEO of Green Platform. "No one else in the marketplace has such a simple solution to this complex problem."

To download the paper, The Effects of Data Center Vibration on Compute System Performance (you need to register)