Archives : 2011 : August
RDX Provides Assurance (As Opposed to Good Luck!) When Disaster Strikes
By Jim Nash, DCIG Business Analyst.
I was driving to Omaha from my home in Minnesota in early August to have our annual company meeting. As I was getting ready, I received a text from my company President asking me what route I intended to take to get there. Normally I would make my way southwest across Minnesota to South Dakota, and into Iowa where I would then take I-29 South right into the Omaha area. “Good luck with that” he responded and reminded me that large portions of I-29 were underwater.
While I have a boat that I used for fishing I did not expect to bring it with me in anticipation of using it as a means of conveyance for this trip. So instead I drove south to Des Moines and then west to Omaha, which added a lot of time to the trip but at least I was dry and arrived safely.
I can’t honestly remember a summer that was so pre-occupied with flood threats, flood damage, and an overwhelming sense of disorder. My thoughts went out to the farmers, and businesses that were impacted by this flood, as they have lost a tremendous of revenue and opportunity.
But as I thought about it more, I was struck with the question of data protection and what were the businesses in the flood plain doing to insure that their data was protected and portable for the potential news of a broken levy along the Missouri River.
Data is the lifeblood of so many companies yet it is also an oft forgotten item in a disaster recovery plan for SMB’s of smaller size. Many do not have the budget or appetite for cloud storage and, in these parts of the county, may not be able to locate a provider that offers sufficient internet bandwidth for cloud access. Further, they do not always understand something that they cannot physically touch. That is the beauty of an RDX solution.
With an RDX solution many in the Missouri river area or indeed any flood plain can still backup and archive vital corporate data, inventory information, customer records, video, etc. But they can keep the portability and a high level of assurance that they have access to their data.
With RDX farmers, small businesses, and single site businesses in the path of the flood can back up to the RDX cartridge in an RDX docking station, eject the RDX cartridge and high tail it out of town in a matter of minutes with all of the data they need intact and ready to recover. Further, depending on how you back your data up, you can potentially even run your application directly from the RDX media without needing to restore it.
This portability affords a CIO, CEO, business owner or even a family farmer the certainty of data protection at an achievable cost with the flexibility to set it up wherever they have retreated as they wait for the flood waters subside.
I think that it would be an interesting and probably sad mathematical exercise to calculate the financial repercussions of data loss due to this one flood event in the Upper Midwest alone. Millions of dollars of property were certainly lost, but what is the cost of lost data? I would suggest that it is comparable in cost to real property and is sadly not an insurable item that one can receive payment on from their insurance company.
Natural disasters are certainly newsworthy on many levels, but resultant data loss need not be for the SMB that can avoid data loss by not thinking ahead. Using an RDX solution can, and will allow you to have a safe, ruggedized, portable data back-up solution when unexpected events like this occur.
About DCIG: DCIG analyzes software, hardware and services of companies within the data storage and data protection industries. DCIG’s goal is to provide an informed, inside look at the latest advances and developments for products and services in these markets in the form of blog entries, case studies and executive and full-length white papers. Visit DCIG at www.dcig.com
RDX Multi-Slot System Libraries Support Medical Imaging Demands
By Rusty Rosenberg, Global Product Management Director, SMB Storage Business, Imation
With the introduction of RDX Multi-slot system libraries (MSSL), RDX is expanding its reach from a direct attach only device to a network storage device that can support a broad range of data center applications. The larger capacity of RDX Multi-slot system libraries, up to 8 TB of online and unlimited offline capacity, opens up support for new applications.
Multi-slot system libraries ensure reliable performance of data-intensive business operations, delivering the scalability, portability and total cost of ownership benefits, along with the speed and durability of disk. The multi-slot system library manages large volumes of data quickly and reliably. Operating in Tape Emulation mode, Multi-slot system libraries function as an 8-slot LTO autoloader. In disk mode (JBOD) mode, Multi-slot system libraries appear to the host as 8 individual and addressable disks with separate drive letters for each slot.
Medical Imaging is one vertical market where these multi-slot system libraries are being quickly adopted. Medical imaging devices (modalities) create data files which require large capacity storage solutions. Medical imaging is the technique and process used to create images of the human body for the purpose of diagnosing or examining a disease. In the past this meant hard copy analog “films.” Today, medical imaging encompasses radiology, nuclear medicine, investigative radiological sciences, endoscopy, thermograph, medical photography and microscopy. One certainty about medical images is that they are digital, higher in resolution and are often large data files.
RDX disk technology is proving itself in medical imaging where RDX Multi-slot system libraries are managing the complex data storage, backup, recovery and archiving functions of this file modality. Following are four emerging uses for multi-slot system libraries in the medical imaging market.
Primary Storage Overflow – Nearline Storage
RDX Multi-slot system libraries are being used as primary storage overflow for medical imaging. Tape has traditionally filled this role, but has had slow performance and lacks the ability to retrieve specific files. But now with the added capacity of a multi-slot system library that can accommodate medical imaging file modalities, not only does the solution deliver the scalability and portability of tape, but it provides the added benefit of the speed of write and retrieval and file format compatibility. It also adds the durability of ruggedized RDX disk technology.
Because RDX is a disk-based technology, the library can double as incremental nearline storage where image files can be retrieved quickly using random access in disk mode. Tape, as a volume-based media, cannot support the requirements of nearline storage where data must be available without the seek delays of tape. The competing technology for nearline storage is fixed disk arrays which lack the expandability, and portability of the RDX technology. RDX allows for simple incremental storage capacity without the investment commitment.
MO Disk library replacement
RDX multi-slot system libraries are also being used as a replacement for Magneto-optical (MO) disk libraries. Magneto-optical disk libraries are popular in some countries for storing medical images where high reliability, long life, and capacity have been driving factors for their use. Today, they are beginning to be replaced with the faster, higher capacity, portable disk RDX Multi-slot system library. An MO library can hold 16 or more disks, however their capacity only reaches 9.1 MB per disk vs. up to 1TB per disk with RDX. Unlike RDX, which is file-based backup, the MO disk library requires specialized archival software to store indexes of data and select disks. RDX Multi-slot system libraries allow the quick retrieval of images and also provide the portability capabilities to share images with other medical professionals.
Backup for Large Files – Medical Imaging
RDX direct attach storage is commonly used for the backup of company data in small and medium-size companies. Because of the increased library capacity of Multi-slot system libraries, RDX is suitable for the backup of the volume and large file modality of medical images. From backup, images can be quickly restored in a usable format through random access to select individual or multiple files thus avoiding the slower seek and restore nature of volume-based backup media.
Tape has traditionally been used for medical imaging backup. Unlike tape, RDX has no generational imitations and as such, is not limited by drive compatibility as tape is. All RDX docks, no matter what generation, can read all cartridges no matter what size; there is generational neutrality. Tape is generally limited in its backward compatibility to a two generation read limitation and a one generation write limitation on a tape drive. This means that data on tape media must be transferred every two to three generations to the current tape drive generation. RDX is compatible across all generations and therefore does not have to be transferred except as bound by the life of the cartridge (30 years). Additionally, because RDX is file based, it does not require the elaborate tape backup software and the overhead that comes along with it. Image file by image file backup is possible.
Medical Collaboration and Long Term Archives
It is a well known fact that network bandwidth can’t keep up with the volume of data companies produce today. Transport over the network is not practical. With medical units needing to share images for diagnostic and disease monitoring, the portability of RDX ruggedized cartridges offer a clear advantage. RDX ruggedized cartridges can withstand a drop of up to 1 meter onto a concrete floor making them ideal for hand-carried transport or shipping offsite.
RDX cartridges provide a simple, fast transport mechanism for hand, courier or overnight delivery. A Multi-slot system library cartridge can be extracted and transported to another Multi-slot system library or a direct attach RDX dock providing dock-to-dock connectivity. The RDX cartridge compatibility between Multi-slot system library and direct-attached RDX provides a means for medical personal to quickly share images.
