Nexsan released its first SAS storage solution this week called SASBoy™. This is the first time anyone has put out SAS storage with energy efficiency. It’s designed for fixed content (content that typically changes little over time) storage and offers MAID 2.0 functionality through Nexsan’s AutoMAID™ (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology. The great thing about the way we’ve done AutoMAID is that it gives you the energy savings without reducing application performance.
Some have wondered why you need energy efficiency with a high performance drive. The answer is simple – even high performance applications are not working 24×7, but when they need the data, they don’t want to wait. Turning off a SAS drive could take a minute or more to power back up, versus our approach which is to leave the power on but selectively set the drives to different levels of energy consumption based on idle time or application response time. I think the better question is – why wouldn’t you do this? Application performance is not reduced and drive reliability is maintained. Energy costs aren’t coming down and we don’t charge extra for our AutoMAID. This is a no brainer.
One of our customers said it best in an article on SearchStorage:
Joe Funaro, director of technology for IT at Lenox Hill Radiology, Diagnostic Radiology Associates and Park West Radiology, who will use his first SASBoy for the primary SAN at Park West, attached to a PACS.
“The BladeCenter and our switches in that data center already throttle back power in the evening when I/O isn’t present,” Funaro said. “Adding that kind of power savings was something we considered with all our new data centers.”
For the radiology clinics, business isn’t always coming in at a consistent rate and none of the clinics operate 24 hours a day. “Sometimes they may have no cases, other times they might have an appointment in the morning and the next study isn’t done until three hours later,” Funaro said. “Why have the storage spinning all that time? If there is a busy day, the array will stay spinning automatically.”
