News

posted on 12 June 2008 09:06

Copan has upgraded the features of its Revolution 300 seriers of persistent data storage products with 1TB drive support and increased performance, availability, security and tape integration.

The Revolution 300 uses MAID - Massive Array of Idle Drives - technology with up to 75 percent of the drives spun down completely to reduce the power demands and cooling needs of the array to uniquely low levels compared to other arrays, even ones with partial spindown. It enables Copan to have unheard of levels of array density with 896 drives in a square metre of data center floorspace.

CEO Mark Ward firmly positions Copan as a supplier to the very top tier of enterprises; the Global 1000 and upwards, saying: "We are not a company interested in moving down market into smaller productisations."

In more detail the refresh involves:

- 1TB Seagate SATA drive support taking capacity, with 896 drives in a single chassis, to 896TB and, at a conservative 10:1 dedupe ratio, to almost 9 petabytes. Compared to 500GB drive support this represents a 47 percent increase in power efficiency in $/GB terms.

- A 40-drive VTL (virtual tape library) cache can now be set up to increase performance. More than 1,000 concurrent data streams can be supported. This is of particular relevance when deduping backup data.

- A hot-standby deduplication engine is provided so that deduplication runs continue if the primary engine fails. This complements the existing VTL failover feature.

- Copan has added data shredding functionality - to US DOD standard 5220.22-M - to ensure no recovery of deleted data is possible when that assurance is needed.

- Additional functionality has been added to automate the movement of data from the Copan VTL to a physical tape library.
Copan uses VTL and deduplication software from FalconStor.

The company has completed an initial build out of a global sales and support infrastructure and already has half of its sales coming from outside the USA. It is firmly convinced that there is a pervasive and sustained move underway to take persistent and little accessed data off expensive transaction-focussed storage arrays and put it on more power-efficient and, in Copan's case, densely-packaged storage arrays to dramatically cut data center storage power needs. Copan can also cut the space needs.

The driver here is the growing power delivery limits being met by data centers.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}