Taking the Spin Out of 'Spin Down'

HDS CTO Hu Yoshida took a step back from all the hype surrounding MAID and spin-down disks in a Q&A with Byte & Switch today.

"We offer the power-down disks, but we havent had much uptake on that," he said, candidly, explaining that the technology often requires additional planning and management. "It takes some time for people to decide to do that, I guess, because it takes some extra work and extra thought."

HDS, which offers the power-down disks on its AMS products, was keen to distance its offerings from traditional MAID last year, although Yoshida says that there is still plenty of evangelizing to be done for the technology in general.

“It takes some time for education and setting procedures and processes to use it,” added Yoshida. “Storage moves very slowly in terms of processes and adoption of technology.”

MAID specialist Copan, which recently claimed to have clinched more than 60 new customers, would probably disagree with this statement, although Yoshida’s comments certainly raise questions about the realities of green storage.The full Hu Yoshida interview, which includes archiving, thin provisioning, the vendor’s green data center strategy, is available here.

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