Nexsan First to Support MAID 2.0

Nexsan , a leader in energy-saving
storage solutions, is adding its support to the intelligent power
management (IPM) and MAID 2.0 technology announced yesterday by The
StorageIO Group, a leading technology industry research firm.

Nexsan is the first storage provider to deliver MAID 2.0 and has been
shipping this new technology since 2006 with its AutoMAID (Automatic
Massive Array of Idle Disks) feature. AutoMAID comes standard with
every Nexsan SATABeast,  SATABoy and Assureon
product and allows the company’s extreme-density storage systems to
power down disk drives to several levels of activity including a
completely idle state to conserve energy yet provide near-instantaneous
access to data. The amount of energy saved depends on user-defined
settings. Nexsan products have AutoMAID built-in at no extra charge,
which future-proofs these long-term disk storage and archiving
solutions.

Nexsan’s green storage
solutions deliver dramatic power savings. For example, where
conventional fiber channel storage consumes 187KW of energy per
petabyte, the Nexsan SATABeast system in Level 3 AutoMAID idle mode
consumes just 6KW. This power savings is achieved without sacrificing
storage performance and also reduces cooling and other energy-related
costs. Because AutoMAID is included as part of the base Nexsan
solution, there is no extra expense or effort involved for customers to
implement this feature.

According
to The StorageIO Group, IPM and MAID 2.0 signify the second generation
of MAID technology. With initial MAID, disk drives were either on or
off causing application performance degradation. IPM and MAID 2.0, on
the other hand, address this issue by providing high performance in
tandem with high energy savings, giving customers the ability to
intelligently align multiple power-saving modes to balance energy
savings with performance and availability needs.

Achieving
greater energy efficiencies with enterprise storage solutions and
within data centers in general is a paramount issue today. American
data center energy usage is setting new records every day and the EPA
estimates that it will exceed 100 billion kilowatt hours by 2011, up
from 61 billion kilowatt hours in 2006 and at a cost of about $4.5
billion. The EPA further notes that data centers on average consume
15-20 times or more energy per square foot than a typical office
building. This will further stress an already strained national
electric grid and drive energy costs even higher unless solutions like
MAID 2.0 are adopted en masse.

"At Nexsan we
believe three things when it comes to energy savings," said Gary
Watson, Nexsan’s Chief Technology Officer. "Make it as simple as
changing a light bulb, make it a standard feature rather than a high
cost extra, and never, ever, sacrifice performance. That’s what we’ve
delivered to our customers in every product we’ve shipped since 2006,
and it’s why we support MAID 2.0".

Nexsan Technologies