When Nexsan introduced the concept of Enterprise ATA in early 2001, we were thinking primarily about how much money could be saved in the data center by using low-cost desktop hard drives to store Tier 2 data and D2D images. Soon, however, we started hearing about how ATA storage was saving power. Raw electricity wasn’t particularly expensive, but once you factor in the costs of UPS protection and redundant air conditioning, the picture starts to change, especially if you are operating near the limits of the existing power and cooling infrastructure. I was recently told by a data center manager in midtown Manhattan that if he wanted more power, there was a three-year waiting list and he had to pay to rip up the streets. Not good.
About five years ago, we started to specifically engineer storage for power efficiency, which led to our revolutionary 42-drive ATABeast (and its descendant, the SATABeast). We basically shared two power supplies and two RAID controllers across what is essentially three shelves-worth of disk drives. Saves money and increases density of course, but also saves a lot of power. We continued to improve efficiency in later releases because disk drives were improving in density and efficiency, but also by working on various power optimizations, which led us to develop AutoMAID.
If you aren’t familiar with AutoMAID, it’s the idea that when a drive is not in use, it is gradually spun down (the heads are unloaded first which reduces air resistance in the HDA, then after a further period of inactivity the drives are reduced to half their nominal RPM, and then if it remains idle we put it to sleep). AutoMAID takes advantage of the fact that typical Fibre Channel command timeouts are in the realm of 60 to 120 seconds, which is plenty of time to pop the drives back into full speed mode if an I/O request comes down the wire.
The key point here is that the array still acts like any other disk drive or RAID from the perspective of the host O/S, while opportunistically looking for ways to save power if a drive or a bunch of drives are not needed at a given point in time. This is often the case in D2D or deep archive applications or in applications which are not used 24×7. At the same time, the way we’ve executed AutoMAID means not compromise on the ability to return to maximum performance should I/O recommence.
Green storage is important to Nexsan and is included in all of our products at no extra cost. We’ve been green since 2001 (long before global warming and green messages began permeating our daily lives) and we know how to provide green storage without compromising performance.
The industry is catching on to the Nexsan AutoMAID idea labeling this class of technology MAID 2.0 or next generation MAID. MAID 2.0 embraces the idea of intelligently idling disks based on application and need while negating the performance trade off.
