Its difficult to read any of the IT press without running into stories underscoring the urgent need to be energy efficient. The boundaries of concern have stretched all the way to Washington, where Congress issued a law for the Environmental Protection Agency to prepare and report on the use of energy in Data Centers today and into the future. In that report, the EPA paints a frightening picture which includes the prediction that 50% of all data centers will be unable to buy any additional power by 2012, because there will not be new power available to them.
The availability and cost of energy is of course not a new problem, which is the issue that Copan Systems addressed when it pioneered the concept of first generation MAID. While the idea is flawless, their implementation was fatal. Copan chose a design that allowed only 25% of the drives in an array to be powered on at any given time. The resultant issue was seen at the application level where inordinate wait times were not acceptable. This left the Copan system with very few places the technology worked well, typically archive, which then lead to a company failure. The lesson learned will be remembered, saving energy is vital, but applications depend on performance.
The need to conserve power, space, and cost is accelerating, which is why Nexsan improved on the idea of first generation MAID in the release of the second generation known as AutoMAID. AutoMAID is implemented to allow 100% of the drives in an array to operate at full power. This eliminates the delay in response times caused from cycling power up and down to different parts of a system inherent to the Copan design.
With that issue out of the way, Nexsan’s performance is great, there are no issues whatsoever for applications, or anything else. To contrast this, with Copan, about the only place you could use MAID was for an archive that had a very low reference rate or a backup repository. With Nexsan, you can use the disk for any application. The only place you probably would not turn on one of the three levels of AutoMAID energy savings is in a high access database that serves a global market that is running full out 24 hours a day. That may represent 10% of all applications. For the remaining 90% of all applications, AutoMAID can save from 20%-70% of necessary energy, and it comes standard on every Nexsan storage system.
