 |
 |
Introduction and Welcome!
Welcome to the premier issue of the RAID Report, your source for simple, easy to understand news and explanations of the latest storage technologies. Each issue will keep you up-to-date on new products and techniques designed to better and more efficiently store and protect your data, while making your job easier!
|
|
Feature Articles
New High-Capacity SATA Drive Available
Seagate Technologies' Barracuda 7200.8 has set a record for storage in a single SATA drive - 400 gigabytes. Spinning at 7200 RPM, Barracuda 7200.8 drives offer performance equal to 10,000 RPM drives, with a much higher capacity and lower price per gigabyte of storage.
|
 |
Seagate Barracuda drives feature Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which allows the drive to service several commands within the drive at the same time. NCQ sorts the read and write commands so that the read/write head moves smoothly across the drive surface, rather than jumping from place to place to service each command individually. Because NCQ reduces the overall head movement, the wear and tear on the drive is reduced, increasing its life and improving reliability. This reliability is reflected in the Barracuda's outstanding five year warranty.
Seagate Barracuda SATA drives are ideal for AC&NC's 8, 12 and 16 bay SATA RAID systems.
Application Feature: Backup to Disk
Many AC&NC customers are enjoying the benefits of directly backing up their critical data directly to disk. Disk to disk backup offers several benefits:
High-speed backups eliminate the production problems of lengthy tape backups. Generally, system administrators must schedule a "backup window", when users are required to stay off-line to avoid interfering with the tape backup. When this window grows to the point that it encroaches on the production schedule, it diminishes productivity. Backing up directly to disk takes a fraction of the time of tape backups, returning the servers to production in a matter of minutes.
Restoration of individual files, or the entire system also occurs much faster as a simple disk to disk copy. The time-consuming process of locating the correct tape, then waiting for the tape to mount and seek to the desired files is entirely eliminated. With the correct access control, users may restore their own files from selected backups without requiring a system administrator's assistance.
Data copied to the backup disk system may then be copied to tape at the system administrator's convenience, without interfering with operations or restore access to the backed-up data. Depending on the capacity of the tape drive, several day's backups can be stored on a single tape.
RAID 6 Explained: The Ultimate in Data Protection
AC&NC's RAID 6 storage systems with Advanced Data Sentry (ADS) provide the highest level of data protection: two drives can fail simultaneously without data loss. As a comparison, the popular RAID 5 can withstand only one drive loss. Should a second drive fail in a RAID-5 array while the first drive is being rebuilt, the array contents will be lost.
AC&NC's RAID-6 with ADG achieves this level of protection by calculating parity in two dimensions, rather than the one dimension utilized by other RAID levels. If you think of data blocks being written in columns and rows, where each drive is a column, most RAID levels only calculate a parity block for each row of blocks. RAID 6 calculates parity for each row of blocks, and then separately calculates parity for each column as well. These two independent parity blocks allow the RAID 6 system to simultaneously rebuild two failed drives.
AC&NC's RAID 6 storage systems with ADS provide 1,000 times the protection of RAID 5 systems. Put another way, the probability of an AC&NC RAID 6 system losing data is 1/1000 that of other RAID 5 systems.
|
|
|
|
|
FREE Shipping!
AC&NC is pleased to offer free shipping on all orders placed in January of 2005. Please contact your sales representative for more details. This is a limited time offer, so please call today!
Note: OEM, Resellers and VAR accounts are not eligible for this promotion.
|
|
Today's Terminology
REPLICATION
Advanced NAS systems provide the ability to automatically copy the contents of a folder or file to another NAS system, either locally or remotely. The file transfer can be scheduled to occur daily, weekly or hourly. Once set up with one simple screen, replication occurs automatically without further operator intervention. Replication provides an added layer of protection for your critical data.
|
|
Resources
AC&NC offers numerous resources for learning about storage, planning your next storage infrastructure, and measuring performance to get the most out of your storage investment.
RAID.edu provides the in-depth information on different RAID levels that you need to build your optimal configuration.
Sample Configurations demonstrate connecting RAID systems to multiple servers, a SAN, clustered servers, or advanced applications such as disaster recovery, iSCSI or disk-to-disk backup.
AC&NC Benchmark Tools allow you to measure the performance of your old or new storage on Windows, DOS and UNIX systems. Performance metrics reveal bottlenecks, and predict new storage performance requirements.
|
|
Upcoming Events
Meet the AC&NC storage experts, and "test drive" the latest storage solutions including high-density Serial and Parallel ATA RAID arrays!
LISA 2005
December 4-9, 2005
Town & Country Resort and Convention Center
San Diego, CA
|
|
Feedback
Do you have comments about this newsletter? Is there a topic you'd like to learn more about? Please send us an e-mail at:
editor@acnc.com
|
|
