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.

Power Managed RAID® Software

Advanced Power Management

ArcFiniti carefully manages the power consumption of the Archive Tier by selectively cycling the number of on/off disks to ensure that data access and cost are continually in balance. Power Management ensures that an administrator-defined threshold of 25 to 50% of the drives are powered on at any one time, in the event that data is required from a LUN on a RAID group that is powered down, Power Management will spin down an operational LUN when it is no longer in use and then power up the LUN that contains the data being requested.

ArcFiniti buffers this behavior to users and external applications by virtualizing this powerful functionality by presenting the Primary Cache and Archive Tiers as one unified environment.

Power Managed RAID Software

As part of the integrated ArcFiniti solution, Power Managed RAID software combines power management and RAID processing to provide access to all disk drives in the Archive Tier. It provides full RAID protection for all data, with disks that spin only when necessary. The embedded shelf controller monitors power allocation and determines the next available set of disks (RAID groups). A range of between 25 and 50% of the drives in a storage shelf are available to the user at any given time. Power Managed RAID software also manages the power budget, and determines if there is available power capacity to run Disk Aerobics™ in the background.