MAID Solutions

Changing the Economics of Storage for Long-term Persistent Data

SGI® COPAN™ persistent data storage solutions shatter the previous barriers of traditional storage options providing a revolutionary alternative to both costly disk-based solutions and economical but slower, less reliable tape solutions.

With COPAN MAID you can have 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 Enterprise MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) - unprecedented reliability, scalability, efficiency and low power and cooling consumption.



Storage Tiering: The Right Storage for the Right Data

Store the Right Data on the Right Storage - By Access and Cost Requirements
Not all data is created equal. Some types of data such as databases, financial data, and online records are transactional in nature - meaning they change or are updated frequently. A majority of data however, is not transactional, but is data that is written once and read infrequently (persistent data). These two classes of data require different storage approaches. Transactional data requires high performance, disk-based storage. For persistent data, previously, the only option was tape which, while relatively inexpensive, was a pain to manage and unreliable for backups and restores. By integrating with tiering virtualization software like SGI's DMF, IT organizations can extend the advantages of MAID technology deeper into the workflow. This further unlocks the power of MAID technology by providing the flexibility to enable such activities as database tiering, asynchronous replication, file system migration, and disk-to-disk backups.

SGI COPAN persistent data storage solution is purpose-built to store all persistent data in enterprise data centers (estimated to be ~80%). This solution provides 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. Additionally you get all the advantages of Enterprise MAID - unprecedented scalability, reliability, efficiency. COPAN allows you to keep persistent data online at a fraction of the operating costs of transactional storage with more reliability and performance than offline media. Keeping data online enables it to be repurposed for increased business value.

Storage Tiering in Today's Business Climate
The vast amount of file based persistent data (write once, read infrequently) residing in today's enterprise class businesses, is either kept online - burdening and consuming expensive transactional storage, or archived offline - minimizing the business value of that information. Although storage tiering solutions are not new to data management, they have not been broadly adopted due to the limited storage tiering options that provide no distinct economic or performance advantages…until now.

Benefits

  • Highly cost-effective so you can archive or protect more data
  • Repurpose more expense tier 1 and tier 2 storage for transaction oriented applications
  • Industry-leading scalability
  • Increased reliability over traditional storage platforms
  • Save up to 85% on power and cooling
  • Save up to 75% in data center floor space
  • Migration for tech refresh frequency halved compared to transactional solutions
  • Long-term data integrity through frequent online checks compared with tape