Startup Releases 3-Tbyte Removable Drive

A small spinoff of a Nevada VAR, whose alternate URL is www.tapesucks.com, is offering a storage DAS appliance for backup it claims will support up to 3 Tbytes of raw disk space in a single removable cartridge.

Highly Reliable Systems (High-Rely), a supplier that spun out of Reno, Nev.-based Sierra Computers in 2003, just made generally available a system called RAIDframe, a housing for a hot-slottable 9-pound removable cartridge called a RAIDPac. Each RAIDPac contains three 1-Tbyte SATA hard drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, one cooling system, and an integral RAID controller.

"Our customers usually order two or three RAIDPacs per RAIDframe," says High-Rely's CEO, Darren McBride. Cartridges are filled up, then moved off site physically (an optional carrying case is available).

Figure 1: High-Rely's single-bay RAIDframe with removeable RAIDPac

McBride says customers typically have 10 to 100 users on a network that supports lots of data on a small budget. "Most of our companies can't afford EMC or NetApp solutions. They may be graphics shops with half a terabyte of video or drawing files, who need lots of storage at a small price point."Each High-Rely one-bay RAIDframe links directly to customer servers via eSATA or USB interfaces, which the vendor claims work faster than packet-based Ethernet-attached backup units, thereby narrowing the backup window. Customers use their own backup software.

All three drives in a RAIDPac can be set at RAID 0, which delivers a full 3 Tbytes of capacity, albeit at the risk of losing data if the RAIDframe breaks or goes offline. Alternatively, two of the internal SATA drives in the RAIDPac can be configured for RAID 5, providing a 2-Tbyte maximum capacity but ensuring that backed-up data won't be lost after an outage.

High-Rely does not support RAID across multiple RAIDframes.

High-Rely previously offered RAIDframe in a 5-bay version, but found that the $10,000-plus price tag, while corresponding to pricing for LTO-4 tape drives, was a hindrance to some prospects. The new 1-bay unit costs $981 for an empty frame, plus about $1,300 per 3-Tbyte cartridge. A system with one frame and one cartridge costs $2,306.

High-Rely won't give out customer figures, but the 25-employee company has 250 resellers for its removable storage, and it's been profitable for three years, McBride says.The concept of removable backup as a tape alternative for SMBs has been circulating for years. Despite the drawbacks, which include having to store off-site cartridges in a physical vault, Dell, Idealstor, and Iomega are just a few other players who also offer removable cartridges and server-attached caddies for use by SMBs.

One reseller says High-Rely differentiates by focusing just on backup. "They're able to support the product well," says Jim Davis, account manager with Computerware Inc. "They're focused only on hard-drive backup systems, so they aren't diverted."

That may change. CEO McBride says High-Rely's next move may involve virtualized storage appliances, though no date is set.

Meanwhile, one customer, Dave Baird, IT specialist of the Olympia School District in Olympia, Wash., is pleased with his purchase so far. After seeing a demo of the RAIDframe and RAIDPacs at a tradeshow, he opted to buy one 5-bay frame and 10 RAIDPac cartridges to back up about 4 Tbytes of school administrative and student-generated data.

Baird's boss, uneasy with newfangled technology, initially pressed for a move to tape. But Baird is sticking by his RAIDframe. "I'd rather see us go with the RAIDPacs that we can just plug in to expand our storage capacity... It's working for us. It's cheaper than tape."Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.