As a complete archiver, ArcFiniti is a fully realized solution that brings to the general IT market an easy-to-deploy package featuring SGI's powerful suite of hardware and software tools, which power some of the world's largest archives.

With ArcFiniti you have a revolutionary alternative to both costly disk-based solutions and economical but slower, less reliable tape solutions. ArcFiniti gives you the best of both worlds — the reliability, easy management, and quick data access of disk — all at a fraction of the cost of transactional storage. Plus you get all the advantages of unprecedented reliability, scalability, efficiency and low power and cooling consumption.

Proactive Data Protection

Disk Aerobics® software is a key feature of ArcFiniti to ensure long-term integrity of data and continuous monitoring of the Archive components.

Disk Aerobics primary purpose is to:

• Provide ongoing and continuous data verification on a drive-by-drive basis.
• Proactively monitor and manage drive health by periodically exercising all disks and detecting potential drive failures before they occur.
• Copy data from a "suspect", potentially failing drive to a new "healthy" spare drive, avoiding lengthy RAID rebuild times and data loss.

In order to deliver on its promise the following steps occur on each drive:

• Disk drive is selected and powered on - the drive is spun up
• Disk Aerobics ensures that the drive functions within parameters
• The health of drive segments, tracks and sectors are inspected to avoid drive failure and re-builds
• The data is read to insure its integrity
• The drive is spun down and powered off
• Details of the operation are recorded and tracked

Disk Aerobics is the key-enabling factor that allows drives to be powered on for short or long periods of time while maintaining data integrity and drive availability. Application of this technology has enabled a massively dense array of storage capacity with increased reliability, availability and longevity of commodity drive technology.