The Company's Co-Founder Talks Massive Arrays and Green IT

At NAB, Copan Systems announced a product-and-technology partnership with Software Generation Limited (SGL), a content-archive and storage-management software provider for media and entertainment. Under the agreement, Copan will combine its persistent-data-storage platform with SGL’s FlashNet system for accessing archived digital broadcast content, giving the company a chance to pitch its technology to a broad range of post-production facilities looking for alternative ways to store large quantities of digital content. StudioBytes asked Copan’s co-founder Will Layton to talk about its MAID technology and explain why it has the potential to increase data-center energy efficiency.
StudioBytes: How did Copan get started?

Will Layton: I am one of the founders. This thing was started in January 2002, and we were incorporated in May of that same year. I have a lot of connections to online businesses as well as Hollywood, as I used to run Ticketmaster in Los Angeles. Copan’s platform is built for what we call persistent data – write once, read occasionally. Or maybe you never read it, but you want to keep it online, because it’s valuable content. That has become interesting because in every market – medical, post-production, government – data is getting higher in resolution. It’s getting more bits per picture, or there’s more raw footage people want to keep around. Driving to keep more data online, this storage economic growth is hockey-sticking instead of going up a certain percentage every year. We wanted to build a platform for persistent data, so we built this technology called MAID – massive array of idle disks.

Can you break down what that means, exactly?

In the world of storage, you’ve got disk systems and tape systems. Disk is good because it’s easy to get to and it’s high performance. But it’s not data-center friendly and it costs a lot. Tape, on the other hand, is mobile media that’s cheap and it scales well. But most people don’t like putting data on tape because it’s not a reliable technology. We wanted to build a platform that was the best of both worlds. We built a new architecture where we power-manage all the disk drives internally. In other words, if the applications aren’t accessing the data, we turn the system off. By doing that, assuming that we’re allowed to turn some of the drives off, we can put more physical drives in a denser footprint than anyone else. We actually put 896 TB in a single cabinet. But we also use very little energy. It’s an 85 percent power savings to our customer. We drive that 896 TB from three to seven kilowatts. And it’s a 70 percent physical space savings.

So back to our problem – and this is where the whole SGL thing fits in, in the post-production world – the Avids of the world, who do real-time data management for broadcast and post-production, as soon as they capture that data they do something with it, they show it, and they’re done with it. They don’t necessarily want to keep it in the Avid workflow, but they want to keep it where Avid’s managing it so they can go back and get to it someday. When you talk about HD video or lots of video content in general, that adds up really quickly. Where can I put that data, keep it around for a long time, and not put pressure on my data center? We did a certification with SGL to be a place to park that data after it’s first created.

So you’re looking to provide archival support that works alongside shared storage systems from companies like Avid?

Exactly. We are the first copy of the archive. In the Avid workflow as soon as the customer, the application, decides it can be archived, that’s what SGL does. It moves that data over to us and we keep it. In a MAID array, we are the caretakers of that data. If the customer doesn’t access the data written on us, we have background process that will validate that data.

And you don’t want your archive taking up a huge amount of energy.

Or physical space. And a lot of people are archiving to disk systems. And for us it’s a comparison of eight cabinets of storage to one cabinet of storage for us. We show our customers every day how to save thousands of dollars on energy alone.

What was your NAB  news this year?

The only thing we announced at NAB was the SGL arrangement. We’ve done business in the broadcast and media markets ‘ one of our early customers was a DVD producer in L.A. We had a government agency that had broadcast in an environment that SGL was in that drove us to do this certification. It was a customer-driven event. It turned out that we sent gear to SGL’s office and it was a quick turn and it made everybody happy very quickly.

What’s next on the horizon for you?

The move to HD plays in our favor because the storage needs are so much larger, and as richer media means drastically more storage. People’s budgets aren’t getting bigger, so they’ve got to do stuff differently. And we will have some major new product announcements in September or October.

Did the concept of green IT  influence your company’s founding?

No, it wasn’t driven by energy savings. It was driven by cooling and density. And, in 2002, the green movement wasn’t going as strong as it is now. But by 2004, when we were shipping our first products and we saw how drastic the savings were going to be, it was clear we had a value for that market. It takes about a kilowatt and a half to cool a kilowatt of energy used. So it’s a twofold problem. The killers of disk-drive technology are typically vibration and heat. Our system has lots of intellectual property and patents around how we cool and how we avoid vibration issues. If I’ve got 896 spinning devices, that’s a concern. But because most of the drives are turned off, that kind of thing is a non-issue.

40 percent of the energy in a data center goes to data storage. So nearly half the problem is energy.  And we drive an 85 percent power savings on that part of the data-center problem. As entrepreneurs, we have been out front. But this is not new stuff anymore, and we have adopters of our technology who are not necessarily risk-takers. In 2004 it was harder to get customers to jump in, but it’s completely different now.

For more information: www.copansystems.com