February 15th, 2008
MAID in green tech heaven: Nexsan's latest energy-saving storage
You’ve gotta love a company that calls one of its products the “Beast,” SATABeast that is. (As opposed to the SATABoy, another one of its lines.)
But the real reason that I’m writing about Nexsan this morning is because the storage company last month claimed a first when it comes to MAID support. MAID meaning Massive (or Monolithic) Array of Idle Disks, a concept pioneered by Copan. Hitachi Data Systems, NEC and Fujitsu also have supported the specification.
MAID’s primary purpose in life is to power down hard disk drives in enterprise storage systems when they’re not working and power them back up again when they’re required to do something. The reasons this is a challenge, obviously, are many. They include delays in data availability, application performance degradation or even disk failure. Enter MAID 2.0.
According to StorageIO Group, an enterprise technology consulting and research company, MAID 2.0 brings with it intelligent power management. More simply put, a product supporting MAID 2.0 can be more finely managed according to the user’s particular needs, allowing for a greater degree of control over which parts of the system are parked or put to sleep or however you want to put it. Here is a white paper from StorageIO on the evolution of MAID. This second paper is more specifically about MAID 2.0.
According to Bob Woolery, senior vice president of marketing, Nexsan is the first storage vendor to offer commercial support for MAID 2.0. Actually, in theory, it has been supporting the specification since 2006 with its AutoMAID feature, which comes standard with the company’s SATABeast, SATABoy and Assureon lines. Better yet, it doesn’t charge a price premium for this. AND it has products that work with Apple server environments. Here’s some info on the Nexsan SATABeast Xi.
Woolery says AutoMAID lets businesses set specific parameters for when the idle mode kicks in. So, for example, after 10 minutes of inactivity, the system could be configured to park certain disks where a delay of a second in file access might be acceptable. (For example, a library of video or presentations.) This, in turn, would result in a 15 percent to 20 percent reduction in the power requirements. If another 10 minutes go by with no activity, the disks are slowed down, boosting the power savings to 30 percent to 40 percent. And so on. The first time someone makes a file request, the system would activate again. In theory, there are periods of time during the day when the power savings could be 50 percent to 70 percent, Woolery said.
According to its press materials, the Nexsan SATABeast system in Level 3 AutoMAID idle mode uses 6 kilowatts of power, compared with the roughly 187 kilowatts of energy per petabyte used by a conventional fibre channel system.
The reason this matters is because data center energy usage continues to rise. The figures cited by Nexsan are from the Environmental Protection Agency. By 2011, the EPA believes electricity used by data centers will exceed 100 billion kilowatt-hours, up from 61 billion kilowatt-hours, and carrying a price tag of $4.5 billion. Even if you don’t believe in the greenhouse effect, you could save your company some bucks if you invest in storage that’s MAID in green tech heaven.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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