ProStor Unveils Appliance

BOULDER, Colo. -- ProStor Systems, a leading developer of removable disk storage solutions, today announced the world's firstremovable disk archive system for small and medium enterprises. Builtaround market-leading RDXR removable disk technology, ProStor's new InfiniVaultT archive appliance provides organizations with an archiving solution that delivers a fast, secure and reliable archival storage platform for long-term data preservation, e-discovery and regulatory compliance in a single, integrated system.

By leveraging RDX removable disk technology, ProStor has created an easy-to-deploy archiving system that combines the performance and rapid retrieval of fixed-disk archive solutions with the unlimited capacity, scalability and disaster recovery protection of removable disk media, in an all-in-one design that is far more reliable than tape and much lower cost than fixed-disk archive systems. With its removable disk cartridges, InfiniVault provides safe off-site archival storage for up to 30 years.Businesses and government agencies will save storage costs, simplify regulatory compliance management, and safely archive their information assets, such as email, electronic documents, graphics, x-rays, images, digital MRIs, photographs and videos, using InfiniVault's groundbreaking unified archive architecture. InfiniVault combines active archive and compliance intelligence with proven RDX removable disk to provide fast online access, scalable nearline retrieval and infinite offline storage in a single easy-to-use system. The embedded Archive Compliance Engine (ACE) features write-once data immutability, archive management, automated file retention policies, security, removable media management and automatic data protection.

"We chose ProStor's new archive appliance because we needed an archive solution that would help us reduce our storage costs and meet regulatory compliance in a simple-to-deploy system," said Dr. Matt Fleishman, partner and information officer of Radiology Imaging Associates. "We believe the InfiniVault, with its unique combination of archive management intelligence and fast, secure removable disk media, is the most complete archiving solution for our corporate needs."

ProStor Systems Inc.

19591 135889 Newswire

2007-10-09T16:52:00Z 2007-10-09T16:52:00Z

Panasas sets new standard for storage system reliability with tiered-parity architecture http://www.byteandswitch.com

Infrastructure Infrastructure

FREMONT, Calif. -- Panasas, Inc., the leader in parallel clustered storage solutions for the high-performance computing industry announced the Panasas Tiered Parity Architecture, the most significant extension to disk array data reliability since Panasas CTO Garth Gibsons pioneering RAID research at UC-Berkeley in 1988. With the release of the ActiveScale 3.2 operating environment, Panasas will offer an innovative end-to-end Tiered-Parity architecture that addresses the primary causes of storage reliability problems and provides the industry’s first end-to-end data integrity checking capability.Traditional RAID implementations protect against disk failures by calculating and storing parity data along with the original data. In the past 10 years, individual disk drives have become approximately 10 times more reliable and over 250 times denser than those protected by the first generation RAID designs in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, the number of disk media failures expected during each read over the surface of a disk grows proportionately with the massive increase in density and has now become the most common failure mode for RAID. A RAID disk failure can cause loss of all the data in a volume which may be tens of terabytes (TB) or more. Recovery of the lost data from tape (assuming that is all backed up) can take days or even weeks. Other storage system vendors recognize this same issue and apply RAID 6, often called double parity RAID, to address this problem. Double parity schemes only treat the symptom of the failure, not the cause, and they carry substantial cost and performance penalties, which will only get worse as disk drive densities continue to increase. Panasas Tiered Parity architecture directly addresses the root cause of the problem, not the symptom. Solving the storage reliability problem caused by these new 1TB and larger disks allows Panasas to build larger and more reliable storage that allows users to get more value from their data and are less expensive for IT to support.

“The challenges with storage system reliability today have little to do with overall disk reliability, which is what RAID was designed to address in 1988. The issues that we see today are directly related to disk density and require new approaches. Most secondary disk failures today are the result of media errors, which have become 250 times more likely to occur during a RAID failed-disk rebuild over the last 10 years,” said Garth Gibson, CTO of Panasas. “Tiered Parity allows us to tackle media errors with an architecture that can counter the effects of increasing disk density. It also solves data path reliability challenges beyond those addressed by traditional RAID and extends parity checking out to the client or server node. Tiered Parity provides the only end-to-end data integrity checking capability in the industry.”

Panasas Inc.