News

posted on 27 February 2008 08:25

Xyratex, the third-largest drive array manufacturer in the world, is joining the power-down club. Spinning down drives saves power.

According to a Byte & Switch report the company's StorView management software will be upgraded to offer the ability to spin down individual drives. This could save up to 40 percent of the array's power draw.

Hitachi Data Systems recently announced it would offer a spin-down feature and EMC has indicated it will do the same.

A more extreme approach is to spin the disks down entirely such that most of an array is idle. This approach, termed MAID for Massive Array of Idle Disks, is espoused by Copan Systems. Its Revolution arrays are suited to disk archival aplications and not transaction-intensive ones.

MAID enables disks to be packed much more closely together as the heat generated in a MAID scheme is significantly less than when all the disks are spinning. It means MAID arrays have unparalleled disk storage density.

Fujitsu, NEC and Nexsan also have MAID arrays.

Power-down or spin-down is a compromise in which disks are slowed but not stopped, leading to faster availability when data on the slowed down disks is needed, compared to MAID.

In January Xyratex signed a programme agreement with NetApp to supply drive arrays to it. This potentially means that NetApp will offer power-down capabilities in forthcoming FAS and other products.