MAID – Massive Array of Idle Disks, as a technology a great concept, but where to apply this technology? In your primary storage this will probably create more worries than financial advantages. When you look at MAID as an functionality in your Backup to Disk or Archive storage, this can actually be a big money saver. In most cases your Backup to disk will only be active during a backup window or when a restore jobs runs, all other moments these systems are (and should be) idle. So if you’re not using you backup to disk why should you keep the disks spinning.
This is the same when you look at you archive storage, only active when referenced but all other moments the disks can spin down and save you big bucks on power, cooling, etc,..
The big advantage comes when you combine your backup to disk and archive storage on one storage system that does MAID but also can dedupe the data. This way the dedupe works for your backup data but also for any duplicate blocks that are archived to the same storage system.
Now you’re really saving money,.. and maybe even enough to afford a real MAID!!
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This is one of the big dis-advantages of B2D i think, a tape on the shelf is a fraction to the costs of a B2D solution that's on for 365 days 24x7. MAID could be a nice solution for that, but are there any vendors that support's it already?
ReplyDeleteHi San,
ReplyDeleteNexsan has a product out called the DedupeSG. This is a combination of a falconstor dedupe B2D appliance and Nexsan storage with MAID support.