With the recent press activity around MAID, I am frequently asked “What is the difference between traditional MAID and AutoMAID?” In a phrase, AutoMAID provides the benefits of MAID without the limitations.
Traditional MAID, or old MAID, trades application performance for energy savings by turning off power or putting drives into a deep sleep. This is an “on/off” approach to energy savings. While this method certainly saves energy, turning drives completely “off” dramatically reduces application performance. In fact, when activated, old MAID only spins a maximum of one-fourth of its drives at any given time. Storage systems that employ old MAID technology can take several minutes to spin up a group of drives, controllers, and other related components before they are ready to transmit and receive data. This is unacceptable for most datacenter applications.
To make a car analogy, when is your car most energy efficient? When it’s parked in your garage. While this method certainly saves energy it’s not very practical for getting around.
AutoMAID, in contrast to old MAID, is a next-generation technology that reduces energy while removing the application performance penalty. In other words, you get energy savings and application performance. AutoMAID significantly reduces energy usage while maintaining the ability to respond to application requests with nearly instantaneous response times.
Continuing with the car analogy, AutoMAID can be thought of as a car at an intersection. It saves energy while idling but accelerates quickly when the light turns green.
While old MAID was exciting in its age, AutoMAID is part of a new era of MAID that provides energy savings without compromise.
