News

posted on 31 July 2008 16:24

MAID storage inventor Copan Systems has received five new patents dealing with massively scalable systems.

MAID (Massive Array of Idle Drives)  is a way of providing extreme disk drive capacity in a cabinet by packing drives densely together and have the majority of them spun down so as to sidestep cooling obstacles from such densely packed drives if they were all spinning. In this way Copan's products can store more than 8PB of infrequently accessed persistent or reference data in a single chassis, much more  than competing products which would require the same number of drives but spread across several cabinets.

Copan aims to introduce a new approach to scaling systems without increased cost to the customer or impact to the overall performance of the product.  The new patents tackle the requirements for massive scale in capacity that has become a driving factor in datacenter economics, including background processing, data routing, proactive drive replacement and drive maintenance and accessing of auxiliary data. The newly patented technology aims to:

- Extend disk connectivity to improve on drive density, providing reduced carbon footprint with its power and cooling capabilities
- Offer a new approach to processing capabilities (e.g. deduplication) – scaling without decreasing ingest rates or increasing cost and complexity
- Proactively monitor disk health and maintenance demonstrating the highest level of system reliability
- Intelligently exercise software extending the service intervals for drive maintenance
- Intelligently assign access profiles for data objects

Copan now has, with the addition of these new patents, more than 13 core patents contributing to the company’s MAID technology.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}