It is not surprising to find that high density, readily accessible storage for the Xsan market is a key concern, given the volume of multimedia content used and reused in today's advertising industry. In order to house its rapidly growing archive of production-quality, multimedia content in a disk-to-disk (D2D) back up model, a pioneer in new media advertising in the entertainment and tourism industries, SK+G Advertising, began, earlier this year, searching for a cost-effective storage solution. They were looking for a cost-effective disk based solution that could handle the large volume of storage without sacrificing performance. Environmental issues in terms of limited data center space and rising energy costs also played into their specification.

Nexsan released the SATABeast Xi, the first high-density disk based storage offering for the Xsan market that brought more than 42TB in a 4U footprint along with embedded energy efficiency, around the time, SK+G began its search. SK+G, working with Condor Storage of Arizona, selected the SATABeast Xi coupled with Atempo's backup software to fulfill its needs. SK+G became an early customer for the SATABeast Xi product and installed the system without outside support over a weekend.

SK+G is using the SATABeast Xi with 28 one terabyte disk drives connected to a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN). For more than three months, the system has been in place at SK+G and already they are pushing toward their initial capacity. IT Director, SK+G, Brian Carter, stated: "We have already stored all our business critical, high bandwidth content and still have room to grow considerably since SATABeast Xi can handle up to 42TB in the same footprint".

SK+G has grown to appreciate the various settings available through Nexsan's AutoMAID technology, which came with SATABeast Xi at no extra cost, although energy savings was a secondary consideration in the initial purchase. The company initially set AutoMAID to Level 1, which unloaded the heads for a 15 to 20 percent energy savings and sub-second recovery time. They are considering boosting that savings by implementing both Level 2 and Level 3 of AutoMAID for certain types of data. At level 2, the heads are also unloaded but then slowed to 4000 RPM. This provides 35 to 45 percent savings and about a 15 second recovery time. At Level 3, the drives stop spinning and enter sleep mode though they are still powered on. Other storage vendors use an on/off model and recovery time can vary dramatically. The SATABeast Xi will achieve 60 to 70 percent savings and an acceptable 30 to 45 second recovery time at Level 3 AutoMAID.