Archives : 2011 : October
RDX Storage Technology Offers New Flexible Archiving Solution for SMBs & SMEs
Recently a new solution has been introduced to the market for SMBs and SMEs which provides a flexible open platform delivering active data archive management and removable disk offsite disaster protection. The solution combines open platform archive management software with an RDX iSCSI-attached, removable disk library designed to provide a multi-cartridge platform for short-, medium-, or long-term archiving.
The archive management software provides a flexible open interface that helps to make the RDX removable disk library an obvious archive solution for SMBs through SMEs and is particularly well suited for businesses that rely on small IT departments and limited budgets. It can be easily installed on servers using a range of operating systems including Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac. Using the RDX LTO library emulation mode, the open platform archive management software allows multiple RDX cartridges to be seen as a single share (drive letter) or mount point. Using non-proprietary operating system search engines, users can actively search and retrieve archived files. All metadata is retained on a disk cache within the chosen server platform, so even files on an RDX cartridge that have been removed from the RDX removable disk library can be found. Once an offline file is accessed, an email notification is automatically sent to the administrator to request the media be returned to the RDX removable disk library.
RDX SSDs Have Arrived
By Eric Slack, Sr. Analyst, Storage Switzerland
What would you do with a 500GB thumb drive?
I’m not comparing RDX with a thumb drive, although I suspect more than a few users have done so as they drop an RDX cartridge into a bag or backpack. After all, a primary use case for this technology is replacing USB hard drives (and tapes) for getting data offsite. RDX cartridges have historically had spinning hard disk drives (HDD) inside. By using these commercial off the shelf drives RDX can leverage the latest and greatest of what the disk drive industry puts out. This design has allowed RDX capacities to keep increasing, with relatively little engineering work on their part (that’s a good thing).
Now, we’re seeing the wisdom of this design payoff again, with the Solid State Disk (SSD) RDX. They’ve taken a commercially available 2.5” drive form factor SSD and put it into the RDX cartridge. The RDX dock has also been upgraded to USB 3.0, giving this new RDX about twice the performance of its HDD counterpart – up to 180MB/s. The SSD is from Toshiba, an MLC NAND device, currently available in sizes from 64GB to 512GB.
Again, thanks to the RDX design, an SSD from any manufacturer could be used, keeping costs down and suppliers available. The Engineering folks at Tandberg told me it took longer to get brochures written than to do the actual engineering work required to release the SSD RDX product. Back to the thumb drive discussion; seriously, there’s really very little this product or any enterprise grade SSD has in common with a thumb drive.
Flash as a storage device
First of all, flash as a storage device needs a little help when it’s put into environments where users really expect to get all their data back. Unlike magnetic media, flash must be erased in full block segments, you can’t simply overwrite existing data a byte at a time. Also, the NAND flash substrate can only sustain a finite number of erasures and overwrites (called Program/Erase or P/E cycles). This means the flash controller has a few things it must do in the background in order to provide the reliability and longevity that enterprise users expect from their storage devices.
Garbage collection
When data’s written to the flash device, after all the cells have been filled the first time, the controller must go through and consolidate data to free up enough space to hold one or more complete blocks, depending on the size of the write. This includes “garbage collection” or the process of clearing out data that’s already been deleted. The controller must also spread data writes out onto as many cells as possible, called “wear leveling”, to make sure the individual NAND flash memory cells are accumulating an equal number of P/E cycles.
The thumb drive you picked up at the last trade show has a controller inside that may do some of these things – or not. Until they’re actually filled up for the first time, users will never know, which is fine since they’re not designed for any substantial long term use. But real SSDs that are used in real enterprise applications, like the RDX are different. They do all of those things (and more) to maintain reliability and consistent performance throughout their useful life – which is comparable with spinning disk drives.
OK, so let’s rephrase the original question and ask: “What could you do with a portable 500GB enterprise class solid state drive in an industry standard RDX cartridge?” According to Tandberg there are several areas that are using this technology.
Video cameras are now all digital, we’re talking about the movie and TV industry,. They store video ‘footage’ on memory sticks that go into the camera but need to transfer these videos back to the editing and production facility as quickly as possible. USB drives and disk-based RDX have been the technology of choice but SSD offers them some benefits. It’s about twice as fast in the transfer process and it’s more rugged than spinning magnetic disk media.
Scientific instrumentation generates a lot of data, with new higher resolution sensors and the increasing use of graphics for analysis. The oil and gas industry is a big user of portable digital media to collect well head data, seismic data, geologic data, etc. This often involves physically driving around to remote sites and changing out disk media. Again, RDX has found a home in this environment. It’s more ruggedized than traditional portable disk drives and more reliable than tape. Solid state storage is even more appealing here since it has no moving parts and can better withstand the bumps, drops and dirt associated with this environment.
The military is also interested in an RDX cartridge with an SSD inside. The “digital battlefield” is a term the DoD coined to describe their focus on imagery and seeing (literally) everything that’s happening, in real time. This means sophisticated systems, lots of sensors and tons of data. A lot of this data is transferred over a ‘boot net’ (the military version of sneaker net), and RDX has found a home here as well. With SSDs, they now have a faster, more rugged and potentially more reliable medium to capture this digital battlefield data and get it to the people who need it.
Mainstream RDX Moves Upstream
By Marije Gould, Tandberg Data
Until recently RDX technology has been focused on the SMB market. Once proven as effective in managing SMB data for backup, protection, restore and archive, RDX storage product companies are now introducing products suitable for the SME market. What do these look like? There are now multi-cartridge platforms that can be configured in multiple modes. For example, RDX-based appliances can look like a tape library or autoloader, virtual RDX drives, stand-alone tape drives, generic disk drives, or a combination of tape and disk. RDX multi-cartridge platforms provide the flexibility for an SME data center to provide removable data protection for any or many systems on the same network.
These RDX multi-cartridge platforms are also compatible with popular backup applications to quickly and easily integrate automated removable disk into existing protection plans and ISCSI connectivity provides for easy integration into existing Ethernet infrastructure.
The growth of RDX technology has been phenomenal in the SMB market and as this important technology enters the SME market we are finding the same reception.
