MAID stands for Massive Array of Idle Disks. This is a technology that promises to provide massive scalable storage at a very low cost.

MAID will be used where there is a need to archive large amount of data scaling up in terabytes. It also provides quick access to large amount of data.

At present only one company named Copan Systems offers the solution as this concept is relatively new.

Actually in older times and even now there is huge amount of data soted and accesed from tape drives. The main drawback of Tape drives is their very slow access speeds. Also, when huge amount of data in a block form has to be stored on a tape drive that has less storage capacity than the block then we'd have to split the block, this is very cumbersome and takes a lot of time. Sometimes it even takes days to access the archived backups in tabes. MAID will surely overcome all these draw backs of Tape drives and provide a much more faster access.

MAID is an array of hard drives combined to work as a single point of storage. Scalability is therefore not an issue. At present the smallest of the Copan's available systems is 28 terabytes, nad the largest is 200 terabytes. The space used by the largest capacity array that Copan produces is just one suare metre, thus saving hume amount of space.

MAID consumes less power and hence produces less heat. This is possible becoz, when data is not accessed the harddisks go into idle mode thus making it more energy efficient. MAID allows the data storage in structured formats like SQL, MS Access and also in unstructured data formats like Word and Powerpoint.

This technology when becomes more dominant will soon replace the present hosting servers with lots of features and also we can find most of the data warehouse shifting to this new technology.

 

 

 

Reply

Wow, sounds interesting.
Do you know maybe the actual access speed of those MAIDs?

These days the admins rather backup data from one hard disk drive to another, or maybe onto DVDs too, but they generally don't use backup tapes because they are too expensive. We'll se if this MAID will have success.

Reply

Truely MAID is gonna revolutionise the data storage. Now a lot of solutions are available in the market. MAID is very fastly being accepted by the admins and the professionals as the archival storage format in their organisation. We may expect our sites to be hosted on MAID in Trap17 in future.

Reply