Nexsan Technologies — Green Storage

Green is good, but don’t be fooled, especially in this economy. All green technologies are not equal and very few IT departments are buying green technologies simply for the environment’s sake. Today’s successful green products, first and foremost, enable significant cost savings. And as more and more IT departments make do with fewer resources, these cost-saving green solutions must also meet multiple business needs without compromising performance. SASBeast, the newest addition to our value-based product family, meets several big needs in one small package and it enables energy savings of up to 60% without impacting performance.

 

Most MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) solutions save energy by turning off drives so they are no longer spinning and consuming energy. That’s fine, but these basic MAID solutions are better suited for Tier 3 or Tier 4 applications, like backup or deep archive, where you can wait several seconds or even minutes for idle drives to wake up and climb to full speed. But these non-spinning drives can’t respond quickly enough for file servers or databases that are online 24×7. Subsequently, customers are left without any cost-reducing MAID for high-performance Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications. 

 

We’re once again changing the rules! SASBeast is a storage system designed specifically for high-speed Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications, yet it uses MAID. But we’re not talking about plain vanilla MAID, this is our unique AutoMAID™. So how can you save energy and reduce costs with AutoMAID while still remaining responsive for Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications like fileservers and databases?

 

AutoMAID is significantly more advanced than the basic “on/off” MAID that is found in other products. With AutoMAID, customers don’t have to turn off the SASBeast drives to save energy. They can start by automatically parking the SAS drive heads after a user-defined period of inactivity. The drives keep spinning at full speed, but the energy needed to keep the heads in position is saved, reducing energy costs by as much as 20%. With AutoMAID, drives remain highly responsive, quickly able to read or write data in under a second and will remain highly responsive until I/O requests have stopped for a user-defined period of time. Furthermore, customers still have the option to automatically stop individual drives altogether if they are not used for an even longer period of time. This can reduce energy costs even further, up to 60%. 

 

So now you have a “new rule” for MAID: Nexsan green with speed!  It comes baked into the architecture of our high-performance and energy-saving Nexsan SASBeast with AutoMAID. Designed to save energy and reduce costs on any storage tier, SASBeast is ideal for Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications like fileservers and databases. Now that’s green you can take to the bank.

SAS drive technology, blazing IOPS and throughput, high transactional databases . . . and green technology. SAS drive technology + ultra green technology. It doesn’t quite sound like peanut butter and jelly does it? You wouldn’t take a race car and create a ‘green hybrid’ out of it. And why is that? Because you’re not expecting fuel mileage from a race car, you expect performance. That’s why you have it.

There is a general assumption about green technology that pervades our collective conscious – in order to reap the benefits, you must accept the limitations.

But, it’s 2009, all ready! And it’s time to change the rules. There’s ground breaking work that’s been done with the latest SAS drive technology that is changing the perceived norms about energy efficiency and SAS. With it, we’re delivering the benefits of green without the limitations. For the first time, someone is giving you speed . . . with green.

Don’t write this off!  Take a closer look. Is energy efficiency something that should be expected from SAS technology? Absolutely. Why? Because even though a SAS drive may need to go really fast when asked, there is no need to keep the drive spinning at full speed all the time, even when there are no I/O requests.

You certainly wouldn’t keep the engine of a Formula One race care running full bore even after the driver, the crew, and the fans have gone home for the night. Checkered flag drops, so do those RPMs!

As ridiculous as that might sound in the racing industry, it’s precisely what happens in the storage industry all around the world. Office demand slows or falls off completely, employees go home for the night, the weekend, holidays . . . but high performance SAS systems run at full power, full speed even when there is no demand. 

We innovated the green storage space with AutoMAID technology by delivering the high performance you expect from SAS with energy efficiency you didn’t know was possible. AutoMAID places disks in an idle state during inactivity while providing near instantaneous access to data when needed. And this is not simple spin up, spin down techniques. This is sophisticated technology that operates on an entirely different, policy-based principal. By doing so, AutoMAID uniquely delivers the benefits of green without limitations. Speed with Green.

Today there are two colliding forces at work — data expansion and economic contraction.  Data still continues to grow even thought the economy is not.  The intersection of these colliding forces creates new data demands – “How do I store and protect the data my business needs to run without increasing my budget?”

Nexsan is tackling this new frontier on several fronts.  Notably, with the release of SAS storage with AutoMAID, Nexsan is innovating in the green storage space when it comes to combining SAS drive technology with energy efficiency…without compromising performance.

SAS drive technology has largely remained outside the energy efficiency discussion for a couple reasons.  First, the necessary smart technology didn’t exist to deliver the benefits of green without performance limitations, which goes against the reasons you get SAS in the first place.  Second, energy was cheap.

In this new frontier, all of us are forced to rethink how to make our storage more efficient, manage it more cost effectively, and lower energy consumption as data increases. Whereas in the past, SAS might have been excluded from the latter issue, it can’t be any longer. As the need for fast storage continues to grow, the need to lower total cost of ownership for high-performance storage becomes more important and even critical. 

SAS disk drives are a heavy consumer of power and cooling – significantly more than SATA drives.  And as storage needs continue to grow, these costs take up a larger portion of a company’s operating budget.  Therefore, a SAS storage system that can reduce costs and deliver speed is a clear advantage for any business. 

Through its AutoMAID technology Nexsan has discovered a way to deliver the high performance people expect from SAS technology with energy efficiency they didn’t know was possible. How is Nexsan able to do this? By delivering sub-second response times from an idle disk without affecting long-term reliability.

When running any level of energy savings with AutoMAID, disks will migrate to an idle state when demand has ceased which delivers the benefits of green we all want. Contrary to popular belief, SAS drives typically experience copious idle time even in businesses that run 24×7. What makes AutoMAID unique and perfect for SAS technology has to do with what happens next: when data is suddenly demanded from a storage system in an idle state, AutoMAID delivers sub-second response time for the first I/O and full speed for all remaining I/Os.  Nexsan offers users the flexibility to customize the period of inactivity before disks are migrated back to an idle state.

That’s part of what makes Nexsan’s SAS storage the most flexible SAS system available. By combining speed with green, users get the performance they expect with the energy savings they didn’t. And in this day of data expansion and economic contraction, isn’t that exactly the kind of innovation you expect from a manufacturer poised to challenge the perceived norms about storage?

 

 

Products, Partners, Performance and Leadership

 

Nexsan had a strong 2008. We rolled out five groundbreaking new products, led the charge towards next-generation energy-efficient storage solutions that do not compromise application performance, partnered with leaders such as Microsoft, Apple and Symantec, greatly expanded our channel presence and bolstered our leadership team.

 

We believe that 2008 was the year that green storage went mainstream. It went from a “nice-to-have” feature to a “must-have” feature because Nexsan and other companies developed products that save energy and money without compromising application performance. With high energy costs and overburdened power grids, customers are thrilled to be able to reduce their data storage energy costs by 20-60% simply by purchasing green storage solutions like ours. And while we have a careful eye on the economy, like all businesses, we are confident in our direction and encouraged that IDC, Gartner and Ziff Davis Enterprise are forecasting data storage as one of technology’s 2009 bright spots.

 

Below, you’ll find more information about 2008 at Nexsan, which can be characterized by products, partners, performance and leadership.

 

Happy New Year,

 

Bob Woolery

Senior VP of Marketing

Nexsan Corporation

 

Products

 

We significantly expanded our product family in 2008:

 

– SASBoy is the first green SAS product

 

– DATABeast is an industry-leading, high-capacity green storage solution that provides Tier 1 features at Tier 2 pricing

 

– SATABeast Xi is the first high-density, energy-efficient storage platform for the Apple XServe market

 

– The Edge is a next-generation green NAS appliance

 

– Assureon 6.0 is the market’s first virtual CAS archive; this product was specifically designed for storage-as-a-service providers delivering them highly scalable, cost-effective archiving. One additional benefit of this virtual CAS archive is its “green maximizer”  technology that allows energy savings to be more deeply leveraged.

 

Partners

 

We expanded our channel presence with the addition of several new channel partners in 2008, including GE Healthcare, Agfa HealthCare and Jack Henry & Associates. We held our annual NexStep channel partner conferences in the US and Europe, which were very well-attended and a great opportunity to share best practices, product and company information as we gear up for 2009. We also expanded our online Partner Portal, which provides our partners with easy access to sales, marketing and technical resources. Additionally, our products were certified by Microsoft and Symantec and we released joint solutions with Atempo and ONStor.

 

Performance

 

For many years, companies of all sizes have been deploying MAID (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks) technology to reduce their data storage energy costs. This “on/off” approach reduces the amount of time — and thereby energy — that is consumed by power-hungry spinning disk drives by putting them to sleep when they are not being accessed. However, early versions of MAID technology, whether you think of them as first-generation MAID, MAID 1.0 or “Old MAID,” sacrifice application performance in a big way, because they do not respond quickly after being put to sleep.

 

Given today’s economic downturn and high energy costs, the need to cut costs has never been more imperative. So, with necessity being the mother of invention, MAID 2.0 has emerged with Nexsan at the forefront. Put simply, it dramatically broadens the benefits of disk drive energy savings to virtually all associated applications and does so without degrading application performance.

 

MAID 2.0 solutions like ours achieve this goal by operating at different levels of user-defined energy savings. These user-defined settings allow for increased energy and cost savings the longer the drives are idle — that is, they go from green to greener to greenest. The drives snap back to full speed very quickly upon an I/O request, thus maintaining high levels of performance. MAID 2.0 is the energy-efficient data storage technology with the widest utility. It does not compromise performance, it is easy to implement and it addresses the core cost issue — disk drive energy usage.

 

Leadership

 

 –Michael McGuire joined us as Chief Commercial Officer; he previously served as VP, Americas Storage Sales at Sun and VP and GM, Sales and Services, U.S. and Canada, at StorageTek

 

 –Dr. Geoff Barrall joined our Board of Directors; he currently serves as the CEO of Data Robotics and previously founded five companies, including BlueArc