Standards organisations like SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) are grappling with the task of how to rate a storage device with respect to its power consumption properties. For example; a storage device might use flash technology instead of disk drives, and thus, it can consume less power while being more expensive. So, it is not prudent to just look at the amount of power that is consumed by a computer device in isolation. Instead, one should look at power con¬sumption in conjunction with performance, avail¬ability, reliability, physical shelf space require¬ments, and cost considerations. Therefore, system administrators have to make trade-offs between these different parameters, and there is a need for new power-related metrics like 10sfWatt or 10sfWatt/dollar, or Watts/Cubic Feet ete.

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Furtllermore, the admins need to look at their respective application workloads to select the prop¬er type of computer resources. For example, there is a difference in the I/O characteristics of archi¬val workloads and online transaction processing (OLlP) type workloads. In archival workloads one does not care about high tlrroughput, whereas, in OLlP workloads tlrroughput requirements are very important. Thus, one can purchase a storage sys¬tem with slower RPM disks for archival workloads than for OLlP workloads because slower RPM disks consume less power and are usually cheaper.