Nexsan Technologies — Green Storage

When recently asked why Nexsan storage is the greenest, I was reminded of Willie Sutton the bank robber.  When asked why he robbed banks he answered with his now famous quote, “because that’s where the money is.”  The same can be said of energy saving technology focused on disk drives. 

Storage accounts for a large part of a data center’s energy usage with disk drives consuming 80% of that power.  Technologies like Nexsan’s AutoMAID focuses on reducing the energy consumption of disk drives.  Like Willie Sutton might have said, “that’s where the green is.”

Almost every storage vendor is discussing energy savings, however, implementations like thin provisioning or using larger capacity disk drives by themselves do not focus on opportunistic ways to reduce energy consumption of disk drives and are missing the big ‘green’.

No matter how many disks you reduce from a storage system, you are still left with some and they are spinning whether they are accessing data or not.  Nexsan’s AutoMAID technology focuses on reducing energy opportunistically from disk drives.  AutoMAID can reduce energy usage on a storage system by up to 60% automatically and dynamically implementing energy saving actions when drives are not being accessed, like evenings or weekends.

Now, when you integrate AutoMAID with other energy saving ideas like thin provisioning, larger capacity disk drives and virtualization, for example with Nexsan’s DATABeast, you have hit the trifecta of energy savings, green, greener, greenest.  Willie Sutton would have understood.

The discussion around MAID has taken a new ‘spin’ of late (“Is MAID finally getting hitched”, click on #47).  While we can spin the definition of the word ‘Idle’, this misses the point for MAID, which is that the storage industry needs to offer energy saving features that meet the needs of more customers.

MAID 1.0 with an ‘on/off’ or ‘spin up/spin down’ implementation is a good idea, but there are a small and limited number of applications that can employ it.  So, with necessity being the mother of invention, MAID 2.0 has emerged to broaden the benefits of disk drive energy savings to more applications where spinning disks are consuming the majority of the energy unnecessarily.

The point of all this MAID innovation is to help customers reduce the cost of powering and cooling their disk storage systems and data centers.  Storage accounts for a large part of a data center’s energy usage with disk drives consuming 80% of that power.  MAID 2.0 technologies, like Nexsan’s AutoMAID, broaden the number of applications that can use energy-efficient storage.  AutoMAID reduces disk drive energy use by up to 60% dramatically lowering power costs without reducing application performance.

The ‘spin’ being created around MAID versus spin down just confuses customers.  Setting aside solution cost and reliability, let’s agree to say that MAID 1.0 with an ‘on/off’ or ‘spin up/spin down’ implementation has a good fit for a single application storage system like VTL with deduplication, and MAID 2.0 with multiple levels of energy savings is good fit for a MAID 1.0 application plus a multi-user system, with multiple applications like medical imaging, email, digital media, scientific computing, some business applications, and the like.  

Let’s make MAID a no spin zone.