NASLite Network Attached Storage

Flying In The Face Of Tape
Firefly Powers Down Disk Drives

By Sonia R. Lelii, VARBusiness

11:48 AM EST Tue. Jan. 21, 2003

We have ecologically friendly cars, so why not environmentally friendly storage devices? That's what executives at a Golden, Colo.-based company called Asaca say they have designed with their new Firefly DM series,a disk-based library for backup that uses no robotics and can power-on or power-down at the flick of a switch.
The Firefly DM backup library, available to the general market this quarter, stands just short of 6 feet tall and comes in configurations ranging from 12 TB to 48 TB.

The device supports various RAID levels for data protection. But make no mistake, Asaca executives say: This product is not just another RAID controller. Asaca is marketing it as a library. So what makes the FireFly machine different from a big, fat disk array? The answer lies in a cool aspect of the technology that helps conserve energy.

Within the FireFly, a maximum of 48 drives can be spinning at any time. The data input and output is monitored, and if there is a period of extended inactivity in I/O, the drives are automatically powered down. Like tapes in a library, the disk drives remain in a dormant state until data needs to be recalled. But once information needs to be pulled, it only takes up to six seconds to retrieve data, whereas it takes about a minute to do the job with tape.

This kind of power-management technology is unusual, says Dianne McAdam, a senior analyst at Data Mobility Group. Disk subsystems from EMC and Hitachi Data Systems are always powered on, consuming energy even when the disk drives are not transferring data.

"Spinning a disk drive down is unheard of. In our market it is extremely unusual," says Chuck Larabie, a product manager at Asaca. "EMC disk drives don't power down because they are still bound by the definition of being a RAID system."

FireFly does support various levels of RAID, but even when the RAID is in place, it does not force the disk drives in the FireFly to be spinning all the time. Larabie says the power-down capability was not the initial focus of the technology.

Which companies are interested? "Broadcast companies," Larabie explains. "Companies that go through a huge undertaking when they make a request for another 10,000 watts of power every hour. So many companies are facing power issues in their data centers. One person, fresh from the California power crisis, told Larabie, "'It's amazing that it takes an economic disaster to create a power-managed storage device.'"

Each library can sustain up to a maximum of 400 MBps of I/O compared with tape speeds of 20 MBps. More important, FireFly makes use of another type of technology that is not often found in disk-based systems. The Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) tool helps avoid data loss by serving as an early warning system to disk failure. Most disks degrade over time. Originally established by IBM in the 1990s, SMART is included in most drive technologies by IBM, Maxtor and Seagate Technology. But not many make use of it, Larabie says.

Can disk finally become a viable backup alternative to tape? "We think so," Larabie says. "The per-megabyte cost of disk drives has dropped faster than any other media format. So we think it can compete in the tape market."


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Copyright 2006 CMP Media LLC.

May I point out - the devices being compared have different focuses.

In that writeup Asaca describe the Firefly as a "disk-based library for backup" - whilst on the other hand NASLite is a network attached storage server.

With a backup system, the unit can be powered on prior to the backup and powered off afterwards - whether this is done by the controlling logic or as the write up says "at the flick of a switch" makes no difference - what is important is that the usage pattern is predictable and allows for this sort of control.

With a storage device being used as primary storage - which is the function of network attached storage - the applications running on the client systems do not know that the storage is not local and expect near instantaneous availability. Demand for access to the storage is dependent on what any user is doing at any given time.

Perhaps a little test of your own might help you understand where I am coming from - since you are contributing to a forum dedicated to network attached storage, I think it's safe to assume that you have more than one computer and you have a network available.

Use one computer to open a Microsoft Access database on a shared drive on the second computer and then place the second computer into standby mode - add a record to the database and try to close it, and then allow the second computer to resume and try to close the database again.

Let us know if you were able to successfully add the record.

After posting above I googled on Asaca Firefly in an attempt to learn more about the product - I did find their website but discovered that the main webpage has not been updated in over a year and the last update to the Firefly DM page was in 2002.

This begs the question - is Asaca still in business, and was the revolutionary Firefly DM successful?

Wow. You spent a lot of time with this....advising me of the "proper" limitations of the product. Are you a server elements principal?

We now own three licenses and am contemplating purchase of another five. Even as a "flawed" implementation - NL is superior to anything else I've tried.

My motivation for posting a "power control" issue is to encourage server elements to help. To reduce our power bill....

What's your motivation?

I believe it was pointed out that it causes alot of trouble to spin down a drive and still have the array and share up and available. I for one would like not to see that implemented in NL. It is simple, the package works and works WELL. It is hell on a drive to spin it down and then bring it back up. It is also an extra load on the PS and other ancilery hardware. I know that the stability of the package as a whole would be compromised. You seem to be the only one really wanting this implimented, why not roll your own NAS server and do it. SOL linux is a good, stable base to start from. If it were such a great idea, the likes of EMC, Hitachi, snd Sun would be doing it. there is a reason that it isn't done. It is called data integrity, If you can't trust that your data is safe, uncorupted, and available 24/7/365 then you loose sleep and maybe alot more.

I would much rather see rudamentry user/share controls implemented as would others. I would also like to see more hardware drivers added to the distro.

Mike

+1.
One day of downtime = way more money than a year's worth of electricity for a single system.

I would rather see UPS monitorring. I lose power for a long enough time to drain the batterries on my ups at least once per year. I like what I've seen performance wise with Naslite2 but I'm not confident trusting my data to it without UPS monitorring.

There is a thread to address that exact concern, I dont know where it is but I am sure that someone will provide the link to it. It may even be a sticky note.

Mike

I saw a thread where someone wrote a slick script to shutdown Naslite via telnet from a windows PC if it was connected to a UPS via the serial port.

Unfortunately two things prevent me from doing this;

1) My ups connects USB. I'ld buy another to make this work but problem two remains..

2) All my serial ports have neen used up on my windows machine controlling DirecTV boxes from my SageTV server

They do have USB to serial converters that work just fine you know?

Mike

Yea, I know, that would work. But my goal in building the NAS is to de-couple the storage from my Sage server.

I've seen mention that the guys at Server Elements thought it was a worth while enhancement and would be a minor release to v2. I was just hoping to get a response as to if this was still the thought process and if so how soon (how big an effort?). I sent an email directly to them from the website this weekend also and still awaiting a response.

Agreed....but not everything is "mission critical". Everything is a tradeoff, and power is a legitimate concern.

Two points:

1. The power issue won't go away. It will affect *everyone* soon.

2. If it turns out that 95% of Server Element sales are made to "non-mission-critical" users...then why is it inappropriate for them to tailor their offerings to their market?

I don't know if you know much about storage and the back side of it. Here is the delema. How do you spin down a drive and at the same time keep the OS from having a fit at not having the HDD available. Also what about the read/writes to the drives, what do you do while the drive/s spin up and come back on line. What happens when they don't come back at all. You add alot of code and the more code you add the slower it becomes. That or you require much more hardware to get the same performance as before. Lets not forget about the greatest bloat ware maker of all time, Microsoft! Their code is at the very base of the piller of stability. Simple is better, I would not feel comfortable if they were to add that amount of code to the OS.

I would stick to the loder version and not change a thing.

Mike