There was a discussion this past week on the increasing cynicism around green data storage. This discussion while entirely predictable is an opportunity to focus on the misdirection of the green storage efforts to date and the new direction market education must take. Much of what has been promoted in green storage is the use of technologies that do not get at the heart of the power usage in data storage, the disk drive.
Disk drives consume 80% of the power used in data storage and unless technologies focus on solving this problem in particular everything else is 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.
This technology approach is revolutionary from old MAID technologies or ‘spin up/spin down’ methods with its focus on reducing energy consumption of the disk drive without noticeably impacting storage performance. The design point for this next generation green data storage technology was to bring energy savings to a broader set of applications by not impacting application performance. This approach takes some re-education. Because of the limitations of first generation MAID, some believe incorrectly that all MAID technologies affect application performance. This is simply not true.
While old MAID and ‘spin up/spin down’ require minutes to respond to an I/O request, AutoMAID selectable response times are all below the typical Fibre Channel time out command of 30 to 120 seconds.
AutoMAID Level 1 saves up to 20% in energy with a sub-second response time for the first I/O. All other I/Os afterward are at full speed. Applications never notice this very slight delay on the first I/O. AutoMAID Level 2 saves up to 40% in energy with a first I/O response time of less than 15 seconds. Again, all I/Os after the first request are at full speed. Being well within the typical Fibre Channel timeout command most applications never know the difference. AutoMAID Level 3 saves up to 60% in energy with a response time of less than 30 seconds on the first I/O only. All other I/Os are at full speed. This response time on the first I/O only is well within the shortest Fibre Channel time out command. Many non-AutoMAID storage systems set their Fibre Channel time out command for between 60 and 120 seconds. Therefore, if you are an organization that employs today’s typical Fibre Channel SAN storage system you will never notice the slight delay in the first I/O of an AutoMAID installed system. Today you can install an AutoMAID SAN storage system and see tremendous energy savings with no change to your application’s performance.
This is the type of approach we need to take with green storage. You cannot ignore the disk drive and claim to save a lot of energy. You cannot claim that customers need access to all their drives at all time even the most high performance applications have down time and that down time can be maximized for power savings. Routine, fixed content data can reap huge rewards in terms of energy savings with the right technology and proper data management. While cynicism maybe increasing for other storage systems, AutoMAID green data storage systems offer change an organization can believe in.
