MAID storage
MAID or Massive Array of Idle Disks is increasingly being offered as a way of reducing the energy required for data storage. The principle is simple in that only the disks being used are spinning, which significantly reduces power consumption and prolongs the lives of the disk drives.
MAID technology is aimed at “persistant data” with anywhere between 25 and 50% of the disks spinning at any one time. There are two options MAID 1 and MAID 2, with the best solution being MAID 2 as MAID 1 provides a significant reduction on application performance as disk drives are turned off.
MAID 2 aims to deliver energy savings to the broadest set of applications without affecting their performance. This is achieved through intelligent pair management.
The benefits of MAID
MAID delivers a robust energy saving solution whilst using the relatively inexpensive disk technology to create an enterprise-class storage solution.
