4.11.2007 - 09:28am ET

(CSRwire) LONGMONT, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 11, 2007--COPAN Systems, the leader in persistent data storage based upon its intelligent, enterprise-class enhanced MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) platform, announced that it has joined The Green Grid, a consortium of IT professionals 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 specifically to address power consumption issues, joins as a contributing member-level storage 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."

COPAN Systems is the first storage company to incorporate green initiatives into product planning and has been doing so for the past 4 years. The very low power requirements of COPAN's Enhanced MAID architecture combined with the extremely dense storage capacity delivers an impressive 91 terabytes (TB) of capacity per kilowatt (KW) consumed, the highest in the industry. This compares to an average power density for Fibre Channel disk products of approximately 4TB per kilowatt and an average rate for standard SATA disk products of 17TB per kilowatt.

According to a recent survey of data center managers conducted by The InfoPro, the average installed SAN disk storage capacity in Fortune 1000 organizations increased from 138 TB in early 2004 to over 680 TB in October of 2006. Given this growth rate of 230%, the amount of data expected to be stored and managed by Fortune 1000 companies will be 8 petabytes (PB) by 2009. Implementing COPAN's Enhanced MAID platform can save these customers between $5.7 million and $7.8 million in power and cooling costs over a four year time period.

With the recent passing of the HR5646, which mandates that federal datacenters put energy conservation at the top of their minds when procuring equipment, more and more companies will be looking into the skyrocketing data center power and cooling costs and what can be done to reduce energy consumption. COPAN Systems recognized these growing issues early, implementing the energy considerations into their product planning nearly four years ago.

About The Green Grid

The Green Grid is open to any and all IT industry professionals with an interest in addressing global energy consumption issues, particularly datacenter managers and IT operations executives. More information can be found at www.thegreengrid.org.

About COPAN Systems

COPAN Systems is the leading provider of intelligent, enterprise-class, enhanced MAID storage solutions that unlock the value of long-term, persistent data. Its energy efficient storage solutions reduce power and cooling costs in the data center with enhanced MAID's unique ability to spin the hard drives only as needed to dramatically conserve power and lengthen the product lifespan. The company is privately held with investments by Austin Ventures, Globespan Capital, Pequot Ventures, and Credit Suisse. COPAN Systems' storage solutions have been shipping since March 2004, with customers spanning the healthcare, financial, government, media, and service provider industries. Solution implementations include backup/restore, archive, and disaster recovery. More information is available at www.COPANsys.com.

Copyright Business Wire 2007

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