AutoMAID™ 2.0 Energy Saving Technology

All NexSAN solutions employ Nexsan's revolutionary, and unique AutoMAID™ 2.0 energy saving technology, which transparently place disk drives into an idle state vastly reducing power consumption, heat and operational costs.

  AutoMAID 2.0 can provide up to 58% total energy savings !

• AutoMAID delivers the cost-saving benefits of MAID 2.0 (Massive Array of Idle Disks) but without traditional limitations of slow access times and special host software.
  
  
• AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set, and offers multiple levels of energy savings enabling users to determine the right level of access speed and energy savings for their environment.
  
  
• AutoMAID is the first MAID architecture that supports VTL (Virtual Tape Libraries), full file format D2D (disk to disk) and standard high performance RAID implementations.
  
  
• AutoMAID is user-selectable from within the NexSan management GUI, allowing this feature to be implemented as desired.
  
  
• AutoMAID can be applied selectively by drive units and can be disabled for volumes requiring the very best response time..

AutoMAID 2.0 Key Points

• AutoMAID can cool all drives at 100% activity (even with one or two fans failed, even in a hot room)
• MAID reduces operational costs, heat, power, reduces carbon emissions.
• Nexsan’s AutoMAID gains the benefits of MAID without the limitations
• Available on Nexsan SATABoy, SATABlade and SATABeast

AutoMAID 2.0 Defined

• AutoMAID automatically reduces power consumption and heat generation on idle drives
• Trade-off between response times and power savings are user configurable
• AutoMAID behavior happens automatically and transparently to host – no software changes required
• AutoMAID is analogous to power saving modes on laptops
• Typical configuration settings:
  - 28% savings – after 5 minutes of idle time, drives are programmed to unload heads and slow down to 4000 RPM. Very fast recovery time.
  - 58% savings – after 5 minutes of idle time, drives are programmed to spin down. Recovery time on the order of 30 seconds.

AutoMAID 2.0 Safety Features

• In maximum power saving modes, drive spin up is sequenced to reduce power surges
• Drives automatically wake up for periodic surface scan to ensure data integrity (typically, once a week for a few hours – user configurable)
• AutoMAID feature has no impact on performance if left on in data-intensive server applications – busy systems will never invoke the AutoMAID behavior
• Only two simple configuration settings – the timeout and the level of power savings desired