Nexsan Technologies — Green Storage

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.

The discussion around MAID has taken a new ‘spin’ of late (“Is MAID finally getting hitched”, click on #47).  While we can spin the definition of the word ‘Idle’, this misses the point for MAID, which is that the storage industry needs to offer energy saving features that meet the needs of more customers.

MAID 1.0 with an ‘on/off’ or ‘spin up/spin down’ implementation is a good idea, but there are a small and limited number of applications that can employ it.  So, with necessity being the mother of invention, MAID 2.0 has emerged to broaden the benefits of disk drive energy savings to more applications where spinning disks are consuming the majority of the energy unnecessarily.

The point of all this MAID innovation is to help customers reduce the cost of powering and cooling their disk storage systems and data centers.  Storage accounts for a large part of a data center’s energy usage with disk drives consuming 80% of that power.  MAID 2.0 technologies, like Nexsan’s AutoMAID, broaden the number of applications that can use energy-efficient storage.  AutoMAID reduces disk drive energy use by up to 60% dramatically lowering power costs without reducing application performance.

The ‘spin’ being created around MAID versus spin down just confuses customers.  Setting aside solution cost and reliability, let’s agree to say that MAID 1.0 with an ‘on/off’ or ‘spin up/spin down’ implementation has a good fit for a single application storage system like VTL with deduplication, and MAID 2.0 with multiple levels of energy savings is good fit for a MAID 1.0 application plus a multi-user system, with multiple applications like medical imaging, email, digital media, scientific computing, some business applications, and the like.  

Let’s make MAID a no spin zone.

What is AutoMAID?  How is it different?  What’s in it for me?

Have you heard these questions?  Maybe you asked them yourself.  These are the most frequently asked questions we hear at Nexsan.  Maybe it’s because of rising energy prices or concerns about reducing costs. Whatever the cause, in recent months, we have seen a steady and growing interest around AutoMAID and in saving energy and cooling costs. 

The industry response to this excitement has been to create some confusion around this technology versus other approaches.

So, by popular demand, Nexsan has created three short audio podcasts addressing the three most frequently asked questions to help clarify AutoMAID and its benefits.  These podcasts are short, sweet and informative; you can download them to your MP3 player or computer for easy listening on the way to work or at your desk.

The link below will take you to these three new podcasts.

Listen to AutoMAID Podcasts

As you may have heard, we just announced our DATABeast storage solution, which incorporates the energy saving technologies for which we’ve become a little bit famous.  Today I’d like to offer some suggestions for optimizing AutoMAID in these and similar environments.

For those unfamiliar with AutoMAID, a brief tutorial:  imagine if you took a RAID shelf and added an optional mode which spins down arrays that are not being accessed, and that the spin down process is divided into three steps which save progressively more power.  You don’t access it for a couple of minutes and it goes into the first saving level which unloads the heads, saving power due to reduced aerodynamic resistance in the drives, then if it stays idle for a while longer, it slows to half the normal RPM, then finally if it’s idle for a long time it’s spun completely down and put into a low power sleep mode.

Many new storage offerings have the capability to virtualize huge amounts of storage and present it as a flat file system or a flat sea of blocks.  The DATABeast, for example, can build single physical LUNs as big as 64 terabytes, striping the data across many individual RAID sets in multiple disk shelves.  Very tempting to put all your storage in one huge volume, isn’t it?  But just because you can, doesn’t always mean you should.  Especially when trying to save power!

The problem is, that any type of striping arrangement means that just a small handful of host operations will very likely result in at least one operation to each RAID set, which means you are not saving much energy.  Many operations, such as read commands which don’t happen to hit our cache, will require us to spin up at least one drive of the RAID set and possibly all of them.  The same effect can happen when using LVM software on the host if you allow it to stripe data across all the RAIDs, or if you combine all the RAIDs into a ZFS pool.  This is fine if you have a deep archive application which is 100% idle for long periods of time, in which case the arrays will unload the heads, then go to half speed, and finally stop until you start hitting the storage again.

By arranging your data such that infrequently used data is pooled together, the pool may enjoy long periods of zero activity, in which case the AutoMAID savings are maximized.  Similarly, resist the temptation to store active data on arrays which are mostly there for future expansion – let them stay asleep until you need the TB.  DATABeast can let you add the arrays to an existing storage pool on the fly, whenever you need it, so there’s not much reason to add arrays until the space is required.   Our thin provisioning technology allows seamless expansion of existing volumes, with convenient operator alerts when approaching the watermark setpoints.

DATABeast also has tools which allow you to migrate your data from one storage pool to another, which will assist in maximizing your energy savings.  The reporting tool will provide information on utilization, which will help streamline your management decisions.  If you want to check your handiwork, each array gathers AutoMAID “efficiency” statistics, which will tell you how close you are to achieving maximum power savings.

In future blog posts we will dive a little deeper into power savings and offer additional ideas on how to streamline the process.  It’s easy being green!

Secrets want out.  The secret around idle disk drives is no different.  Joab Jackson at GCN (Government Computer News) reported that researchers from University of California and NetApp recently presented preliminary results of a study on data access patterns on NAS systems, “Most network data sits untouched”.  One key finding from this study is 90 percent of the files on servers are never accessed.

If 90 percent of the material on the servers was never accessed, why on earth is anyone paying to keep it running 24×7? What a no-brainer for AutoMAID (Nexsan’s proprietary energy-saving technology that reduces disk drive energy when disks are idle). 

From Mr. Jackson’s article . . .

“During the three-month period that the network was under scrutiny, more than 90 percent of the material on the servers was never accessed. The researchers captured packets encoded using the Common Internet File System protocol, which Microsoft Windows applications use to save data via a network. About 1.5T of data was transferred.

“Compared to the full amount of allocated storage on the file servers, this represents only 10 percent of data,” Leung said. “[This] means that 90 percent of the data is untouched during this three-month period.”

Moreover, among the files that were opened, 65 percent were only opened once. And most of the rest were opened five or fewer times, though about a dozen files were open 100,000 times or more.

“What this suggests, in general, is that files are infrequently re-accessed,” Leung said.”

Andrew Leung is a computer science researcher at the University of California and presented these findings at the USENIX conference in Boston.

Turning off the lights when they are not needed is one of the fastest, easiest and least expensive ways to save energy.  Why not do the same for your fixed content data and turn down energy use for your storage drives when they are idle? 

Better yet, why not treat the energy saving technology for disk drives like a dimmer switch.  You can dial down the energy use to match your application needs, but bring it back again right away. In a medical facility, a PACS image may sit idle for weeks and months, but when the doctor needs it in an emergency, the image needs to be instantly accessible.

Far too many administrators are wasting large amounts of energy (and, of course, money) because they think their storage systems need to run at full power 24×7.  Realizing the secret that storage is idle at times (especially on nights and weekends) is the first step towards significant savings.

The secret is getting out. 

There was a simple yet telling comment in the New York Times recently (‘The Rise of the Humble Engineer,’ June 17, 2008 ) from Chandrakant Patel, a mechanical engineer in HP Labs who oversees the company’s programs in energy-efficient data centers and technology.  He’s working on research focused on things like replacing cooper wiring in server computers with laser beams.  Very cool stuff.  But, he added ‘data centers can be made 30 percent to 50 percent more efficient by applying current technology.’

Bingo!  He hit it right on the head.  There is no doubt a great need for advanced new energy-efficient technologies exists, and we trust smart minds like Mr. Patel will unearth them.  But, there is also much that can be done right now, simply and cost effectively.  The technologies exist, and in many ways, they just need to be turned on.  

One simple and easy way to incorporate green storage technology is to purchase energy-saving storage that is designed into your normal, ongoing RAID storage purchases.  We feel strongly that energy efficiency should not be an afterthought or a separate consideration.  It should be designed in from the beginning, at no added cost and with no added technical decisions.  To this end, our AutoMAID technology comes as a standard feature on all Nexsan storage products at no extra charge.  Best of all, activating AutoMAID is as simple as changing a light bulb.

Everyday people are offered simple ways to save energy in their homes through the use of energy-efficient light bulbs.  AutoMAID offers a similarly user-friendly approach; it doesn’t require sophisticated or expensive software on the host computer or even a professional services engagement.  Data center administrators need only toggle a setting or two and they’re done—the system takes care of the rest.  It powers down according to user-defined settings, saving energy but not sacrificing performance because it returns to full activity nearly instantaneously.  Saving energy with AutoMAID is as simple as installing an energy-efficient light bulb and the effect can be more dramatic with power savings of 20-60 percent.

We’re cheering on Mr. Patel and the efforts of other brilliant engineers diligently working on new ways of tackling the energy challenges of data centers today and into the future.  And we also concur with this opinion that there is no reason to wait.  Significant energy savings, through the aggressive deployment of existing technologies, can and should be had today.