09 February 2010
Tuesday
MAID yet to reach full potential
By Dave Raffo | Apr 29, 2009
0 comments
Facebook
LinkedIn
Digg
Email
PrintAlthough frequently identified with green data centers and commonly offered in storage systems, analysts say massive array of idle disks (MAID) technology remains underutilized five years after it first became available.
"MAID should be playing a role [in green data centers]," said Mark Peters, an analyst at Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), who points out that there's no sign of a marked increase in the use of MAID or any disk spin-down. "Although I suspect it's going to become more important as the OPEX crunch hits. More attention is being paid to dedupe [than to MAID] right now."
"It's one of the buzzwords out there, but it's not one of those things that customers are racing to turn on," said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at Stillwater, Minn.-based StorageIO Group. "It's become a checkbox thing: 'OK, we have it.' It's just another feature."
Copan Systems Inc. created the term MAID in 2004, when it brought out its first massive array of idle disks systems that only used a maximum 25% of its hard drives at once. The idea was to power down drives when they weren't in use, cutting down the data center footprint of denser systems and expanding the life of low-cost SATA drives by spinning them less frequently.
Disk spin-down became synonymous with MAID, and is frequently mentioned as one of the key green technology options. Other vendors followed with various levels of spin-down over the next few years, including DataDirect Networks Inc., EMC Corp., Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems, NEC Corp. and Nexsan Technologies Inc.
MAID became more intelligent, with various levels of power savings added against performance tradeoffs. For example, Nexsan Technologies' AutoMAID feature allows systems to work without spin-down during times of peak workload and to put them in a suspended sleep-standby mode at other times.
But while smaller vendors such as Copan and Nexsan Technologies still market MAID aggressively, it has become just another feature for large vendors such as EMC and Hitachi Data Systems.
"Everybody's added some disk slowdown capability," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at Hopkinton, Mass.-based Taneja Group. "They don't all drop it down to zero because the restart time is way too long for some applications. But they spin it down to save power where access time is acceptable. It's a balancing act."
Added Schulz at StorageIO Group: "While MAID 1 has pretty much gone nowhere, vendors are supporting second-gen MAID, MAID 2.0 or intelligent power management."
Copan Systems didn't stand still with the technology as others joined the game. It added the ability to dedupe and replicate data in its libraries, and gave customers the ability to set aside up to 40 drives for a cache separate from the MAID pool. The drives in the cache always spin and increase the ingestion rate for deduplication.
