Wrapping a green cloak around its shoulders Adaptec has impressively extended its RAID controllers' capabilities by making them spin down disk drives as well. It's also joined the Green Grid, the IT industry's data centre greening group.

All Adaptec Series 2 and 5 RAID controllers can now send messages to disk drives telling them to stop or start and, for certain drives, spin more slowly to conserve power. Spin-down drives from Fujitsu, Hitachi GST, WD and Seagate are supported in this slow-spin mode.

It's very irritating for Copan as its MAID technology - massive array of idle drives - with densely-packed drive arrays, 75 percent of which are idle, doesn't stand out anywhere near as much as it did. It can pack far more drives into an array than anyone else because idle drives don't generate heat, but other manufacturers, when asked about MAID, say: "Spin-down? Oh, yes, we have that," and muddy MAID's marketing position considerably.

Adaptec is enabling every other storage array manufacturer and system integrators to add spin-down and so green their products by saving power in arrays that have a lot of idle time, the disk-to-disk backup targets, the VTLs, the disk archives, that sort of thing.

This is the second major Adaptec announcement in a week. It has just bought Aristos for its RAID ASIC technology, having been reliant on Intel Xscale processors up until now. With its financial results improving after a loss-making fiscal 2008 and the offloading of its Snap Server business to Overland Storage, CEO Sundi Sundaresh has a sunnier expression on his face. Feel the green power.®

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• NetApp tried to buy Snap NAS business in 2004 (10 July 2009)
• Adaptec adds NAND cache to RAID cards (25 June 2009)
• Intel scales EPA 'green' list (30 April 2009)
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• Grid computer recreates ancient Greek lute (3 September 2008)
• Overland snatches Adaptec's Snap Server biz (30 June 2008)
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• Adaptec lobs Series 5 RAID controllers at SATA and SAS (3 March 2008)
• All aboard the Green Grid (11 April 2007)