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.
