Alpine Bank Saves With Green Disk Drive System

Alpine Bank of Colorado recently announced the introduction of a new automated disk drive platform which reduces the power and cooling used by current disk drive systems. The bank reports that they’ve reduced storage costs by 30 percent and energy use by over 20 percent.

The system, which is made by Nexsan, works by automatically idling the disk drives whenever they aren’t in use. Usually, disks spin at 7,200 RPMs, but the idling disks are significantly slower. At the 20 percent power savings level that Alpine Banks uses, it takes less than a second for the system to return to full power.

Alpine Banks has made a number of other environmental upgrades in recent months. David Miller, the chair of the bank’s “green team,” says that other projects include replacing all of the incandescent lighting in their ten-story office building and purchasing Canary Tags to offset its carbon emissions. The bank is ISO 14001-certified, which means that they’ve met International Organization for Standardization’s environmental management standards.