Storage firm Adaptec has announced a number of power saving features for its Series 5 and 2 RAID servers.

The vendor claimed that the additions could help firms reduce power use by up to 70 per cent, without affecting system performance.

The Intelligent Power Management features are available now to Adaptec users at no extra cost, the firm said, and would best suit applications that have a lot of idle time, such as email archiving, backup and file and print servers.

Ideally, the firm said, it would be custom-configured either in-house, or by systems integrators and OEMs.

Adaptec said that the release kicked off its Green Power Initiative, but the firm also talked up the cost savings that they offered businesses.

"As global data storage needs grow dramatically, so does the need for even more high-performance disk drives," said Suresh Panikar, director of worldwide marketing at Adaptec.

"Disk drives consume about 33 per cent of all the storage in an IT environment and are one of the most energy-intensive components in any computing system.

"With Intelligent Power Management, we are expanding the capabilities of our RAID controllers to address this issue.

"The cost and energy savings achieved with Intelligent Power Management are enormous, potentially several hundred thousand dollars per year."

Intelligent Power Management works in three ways. 'Normal' operation offers full power running, 'Standby' spins disks at a lower RPM during idle time, and 'Power Off' stops disks spinning.

All of these can be configured by the user through an Adaptec management suite.