INFORTREND ANNOUNCES ADVANCED POWER-SAVING FEATURE MAKING STORAGE GREEN IN A SMARTER WAY
Enhanced Configuration Flexibility Frees Users from Performance/Energy Efficiency Dilemma

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 20, 2009 – Networked storage expert Infortrend® (Public TPE: 2495) today announced an enhanced power-saving feature for its EonStor subsystems that will enable them to deliver high performance along with energy efficiency through a system power requirements reduction of as much as 65%. Allowing users to flexibly configure power-saving levels for individual logical drives, the enhanced feature promises to maintain applications' service levels when implementing power-management mechanism.

According to information technology analyst and consulting firm StorageIO, spinning hard disk drives (HDDs) and their enclosures account for up to 75% of the power usage in commonly deployed storage solutions. It explains why drive spin down is one of the main technologies that can enable lower power consumption in storage devices. However this technology can impact on system performance as traditionally, a spun-down HDD takes between 30 and 45 seconds to spin up again. As a result, the risk of performance drop presents users with a dilemma about whether to apply drive spin-down to certain applications which may not always be active but which require fast response when accessed, such as CRM.

Infortrend's enhance power-saving feature with level flexibility addresses this issue; depending on applications' access frequency and ideal performance levels, users can configure the power-saving mode of their respective logical drives as level 1, level 2, or the combination of the two. Set with level 1 mode, HDDs will enter idle state if they have not received I/O for a user-configured period of time. In this state, disk drives take only one second to respond when accessed. Set with level 2 mode, the drives enter spin-down state. According to Infortrend's internal tests, although spun-down drives takes longer to respond when accessed, they require less than 20% of power consumption and contribute to overall system energy savings of approximately 50% and up to 65%. The two levels can be further combined into a two-stage procedure. Receiving no I/O for a pre-set period of time, the HDDs would first become idle then, if the no I/O status continues  the disk drives will spin-down. The enhanced power-saving feature gives users the freedom to find their own balance between storage performance and energy efficiency.

"In recent years the trend of green IT has become more and more widespread across the data center," said Thomas Kao, product planning director at Infortrend Inc. "The call for energy savings has driven the launch of several power-saving features and solutions including servers, switches and storage systems. When more and more products are being positioned as "green", users' demands move up a level and they are now pushing for solutions which are both green and smart

Availability

The new technology ships with all EonStor subsystems using Firmware ver.3.64J and 3.64P or later, but users have to make them accommodate drives supporting power-saving/spin-down features. For further information please contact Infortrend http://www.infortrend.com/ or your dealer.

About Infortrend

Infortrend, the networked storage expert, is a pioneer in cost-effective, high performance storage products. The company provides EonStor® storage subsystems and SANWatch® software for virtually all storage interfaces including Fibre Channel, SAS, iSCSI, SCSI and SATA. For over a decade, Infortrend has provided reliable, fault-tolerant technology to prominent ODMs, distributors, and storage integrators worldwide. The company's core competency includes performance optimized RAID ASICs, feature-rich firmware, and redundant, high availability RAID subsystems. Founded in 1993, Infortrend is traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (Taiex), ticker number 2495. For more information, visit www.infortrend.com.

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Infortrend, EonStor, SANWatch, and EonPath are trademarks or registered trademarks of Infortrend Technology, Inc. Infortrend, EonStor, SANWatch, and EonPath are trademarks or registered trademarks of Infortrend Technology, Inc.   Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.