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.
