Nexsan Technologies — Green Storage

With growing capacity needs, shorter backup windows and escalating energy costs coupled with shrinking datacenter space, tighter budgets and the need for faster restores, IT professionals are demanding a new kind of deduplication solution. It’s not just about saving storage anymore. It’s about saving time, energy, space and resources – a more holistic approach to storage efficiency.

An efficient data center should be more than a data center that conserves energy costs. The efficient data center is one that has been optimized to reduce overall data while delivering power efficiency, space efficiency and cost efficiency. By combining all these benefits together, this new data center can provide storage optimization that truly delivers bottom-line value. 

The cost of traditional storage solutions makes it difficult for organizations to efficiently backup and store their rapidly growing business and application data. Compounding this challenge are tight budgets which drive an increased demand for solutions that will improve operating efficiencies while meeting performance requirements. 

So why is it so hard to achieve both? 

It shouldn’t be. Especially for storage deduplication systems which are primarily used as backup targets. The typical backup window is less than eight hours a day. Yet, most deduplication systems spin drives and burn energy for the remaining 16 hours of operation. 

Would you leave your car running at full speed in the driveway when not using it? Probably not. So why would you keep your storage running at full speed between back-up windows? Not only is it wasting power to operate, but it’s wasting power to cool as well. 

By automatically reducing power consumption of the backup system when it’s not in use, companies can realize immediate savings – without giving up performance. They get “Speed with Green” (SG). And by combining this with data reduction through high-speed deduplication, footprint reduction by utilizing space-efficient storage arrays, all in a cost-efficient, integrated solution, the efficient data center shouldn’t be hard to achieve. Rather, the question should be why settle for anything less? 

Nexsan and FalconStor don’t think anyone should have to. That’s why we have paired up to deliver a single, high-performance, power-efficient solution that packs data deduplication features into a high-density solution that intelligently and automatically lowers its power consumption when not in use. With the Nexsan DeDupe SG, any company can get “Speed with Green” for a truly efficient data center without giving up a thing.

The discussion of value has stimulated a lot of reaction. I recently had an interesting discussion regarding value as a concept that users need to relearn.

Over time, users have wrongly become convinced that they need a different storage system for different types of applications. But with top quality and high-end functionality now found across all tiers of storage, why do users need to purchase a different system for different uses? The answer is: they don’t.

Just because some storage vendors push this specialized approach doesn’t mean that users should or need to accept it.

Most of us don’t do this with our family transportation. Most families don’t need to purchase a separate car for grocery shopping, going to work and taking the kids to school. Most cars provide high enough quality, performance and functionality to provide fast, safe transportation to shop, work and care for children. 

Why can’t storage be the same?

Sure, there are a few exceptions, but most organizations can store most or all of their data and applications on one type of storage system that is easy to use, affordable and enterprise-class.

Approaching storage this way has tremendous value to an organization. It reduces acquisition, integration, and management costs, and it dramatically reduces complexity! That broadens the meaning of the term value beyond just a financial term.

What business would not be better enabled, more competitive and better positioned to survive and grow out of this economic situation thanks to a storage product that is good enough to serve most or all of their data and applications? 

Users have grown accustomed to buying different storage systems for different applications, yet this incorrect practice has created far too much complexity. For deep-pocketed organizations with the luxury of purchasing different storage systems for different data and applications, that’s great, but for the vast majority of organizations, why not challenge this old way of thinking by purchasing single storage systems that can serve most of your data and applications?

At Nexsan, we believe in top quality and high-end functionality for all storage systems at a price any organization can afford. Functional value with financial value. And in times like this, isn’t that what you need all of your technology suppliers to do? 

Things have changed, and along the way something has happen to the meaning of value.

Back in the day, value meant you got a lot for your money. More bang for the buck, so to speak. Value was never supposed to mean merely low price. Just because something is low-priced, doesn’t mean it’s a good value.

In the current economic climate, many customers are looking for straightforward low prices, and that’s fine and at times probably appropriate. But almost any vendor in any market can play the low-price game and meet the needs of such customers. However, what customers should be focusing on and what our economy really needs are products that deliver high functional value – that is, products that enable you do more things or get more done while also providing you a fair price.

Some storage vendors are now pushing a low cost message and paying no attention to extending their financial value proposition by simultaneously adding a new level of functional value for users. Price alone has rarely proven a sustainable strategy.

What business would not be better enabled, made more competitive, positioned to survive and grow out of this economic situation by products that deliver both greater functional and financial value? Products that deliver true value are ideally suited for a wide range of crucial and current applications, and getting more done with less or the same resources is a refrain we hear time and time again in meetings with CIOs and other executives.

The combination of true function-value and financial-value is rare today. Such solutions are frequently marketed but rarely delivered. Users have grown accustomed to buying a low priced/low function product or a high priced/highly functional product for different storage needs. But our current economic climate with its resulting tighter IT budgets demands a return to the old-school flavor of value. Honest value in which you feel good about what you bought; a product that has the flexibility to address a wide range of standard daily tasks but also offers manageability, scalability, and a price that doesn’t make you wince.

Value does not mean settling for a low price, feature-less or low quality product as a result!

We believe in real value at Nexsan, and right now, isn’t that what we need now more than ever?

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

One would expect content-addressable storage (CAS) archives to be the most energy-efficient area of data storage, because they are all about fixed-content, i.e. data that doesn’t change after it is created and is infrequently accessed.  However, and quite ironically, CAS archiving has always presented a unique challenge to energy efficiency.  This is because CAS archiving systems traditionally have been based upon one CAS object store and its database running across all the system disk drives, which means that a simple request for one file — or a standard diagnostic task — requires the system to spin up every single disk to get that one file.

This is not dependant on the size or power of the CAS object store and database; it is simply a limitation of traditional CAS archive architectures.  With our recently released Assureon 6.0 secure archiving system, Nexsan has fundamentally solved this challenge with its virtual archive architecture.  For the first time, CAS archive customers can maximize the benefit from energy-saving technology such as Nexsan’s AutoMAID.

So, how did we arrive at this virtual archive architecture?  Let’s back up a minute.  There is a dirty little secret of CAS archiving called object limits.  CAS object stores and their databases are constructed in a way that imposes a strict object count limit on the number of files (objects) that can be stored.  Because stored data can include millions of small files, such as emails, customers may reach an object limit in their archive long before they reach their storage capacity (preceding generations of Assureon negated this problem by independently scaling storage and processing nodes but, there are additional cost reduction and scaling benefits in eliminating object limits).  So, the Assureon team set out to conquer that limit, and developed the virtual archive architecture as an elegant solution.

This architecture allows for the creation of virtual archives.  When object limits are reached, other vendors sell you an additional expensive system because that is their only option. Assureon can simply create an additional virtual archive and add on more (inexpensive) storage as needed.  That circumvents the object limit while preserving all that is great about CAS archiving –high levels of data security, integrity, longevity, etc.

The secret bonus in all this is that the virtual archive architecture also maximizes the green benefits of AutoMAID.  While Assureon always included Nexsan’s AutoMAID technology, in the past, the traditional single CAS object store and database structure limited energy saving benefits.  Nexsan’s new virtual archive architecture can manage data at the disk level, which means that a simple file request or diagnostic task can now spin up only the disk or disks needed, rather than the entire system, thus dramatically increasing energy savings.

This innovation also allows AutoMAID energy-saving levels to be maximized for each drive, which means that significant energy savings can be achieved since the disks can remain idle until the data on them is needed.  This is a huge victory for CAS archive customers.  We refer to the virtual archive architecture as “green maximizer” technology, since it allows AutoMAID to be more deeply leveraged in order to provide energy savings of up to 60 percent.  By setting out to tackle one dirty little secret of CAS archiving, we wound up fixing two.

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.

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.