Archives : 2011 : May

Backup performance improves by up to eight times with SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and new SSD cartridges

Tandberg Data is now offering a new series of RDX removable disk products with the introduction of USB 3.0 connectivity for its RDX QuikStor data protection product. Tandberg is also offering a new line of RDX cartridges based on solid-state disk (SSD) technology.

The RDX QuikStor is an RDX-based storage system, ideal for SMBs and remote offices. It combines the benefits of tape with the benefits of hard disk technology and delivers 20:1 deduplication and data protection when activated with the RDX AccuGuard.

The RDX QuikStor SuperSpeed USB 3.0 docks are compatible with all RDX cartridges, and achieves speeds of up to eight times that of the USB 2.0 and SATA versions.

The new cartridges come in standard high-capacity RDX cartridges or new RDX solid-state disk cartridges. The solid-state disk cartridges are designed for mission-critical applications, such as medical and military, and include capacities of up to 512 GB. Standard RDX is available up to 1 TB

RDX brings Nearline Back

By Senior Analyst Eric Slack of Storage Switzerland. “Nearline” is a term that typically describes storage products that are somewhere between high performance disk arrays and media sitting on a shelf. While it’s also been used by disk drive vendors and dedupe appliance vendors, nearline usually refers to removable media, at least that’s how Wikipedia and TechTarget define it. When you call spinning disk storage “online” and tapes on a shelf, “offline”, it makes sense to call “nearline” removable media that’s in a replay device (a drive) or in a library.

Using this definition, nearline’s original implementation was probably as part of a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system or information lifecycle management (ILM) system – essentially the precursors to today’s tiered storage. For a while, there was the option of using optical media, which provided a random-access format that could be handled by a robotic library as well. But the capacities of optical technologies never caught up to tape and it’s all but gone now, hastened by the advent of WORM certification for other storage media, like tape and spinning disk.

Nearline was a logical concept that never really caught on, partly because its economics in the ILM and HSM use cases relied on saving money on disk storage. This strategy has always been difficult from an economics standpoint, thanks disk’s continual drop in per-GB hard drive costs. Another problem nearline had was performance, based mainly on the media it used. Serial technologies, like linear tape, required long seek times after the media was loaded into a drive. This isn’t as much of an issue for applications that stream large files, such as media and entertainment, oil and gas, medical imaging, etc., and tape ‘active archives’ are a good fit for these industries. But this access latency makes individual file retrieval difficult and nearline as originally implemented, not as good of a fit for archiving smaller file reference data.

RDX may be a better option for the nearline application as defined above, especially for users that aren’t in the large end of the archive market. It’s WORM certified and can replace optical disk formats that may have been required for regulatory compliance in certain industries. But being truly random access, RDX is the removable media format that’s closer functionally to online spinning disk. When archived data sets need to be pulled back to active status, RDX can make the contents of the entire cartridge available instantly. There’s no need to copy part or all of a piece of serial media back onto spinning disk in order to make it more accessible to applications. In some respects it provides the best of the other removable media types, but also adds something else – format longevity.

RDX doesn’t rely on a complex piece of external hardware, like a drive, in order to recover stored data. RDX docks are essentially a power supply and an Ethernet connection, as all the read and write processes occur on the disk drive that’s incorporated into the cartridge itself. When Moore’s Law pushes disk drive capacities up, RDX can take advantage of that and increase its cartridge capacity as well. The dock stays the same, regardless of the cartridge it’s used for, which means that newer generations of the technology should not obsolete older RDX media.