Transportable RAID FieldPac, From Storage Design Initiatives

Storage Design Initiatives (SDi) announces FieldPac, a transportable disk-based RAID technology. FieldPac provides a method of moving massive amounts of data between sites, quickly and reliably, without the fuss and awkwardness of tape handling.

For years, tape has been the medium of choice for data-storage managers everywhere. It’s less expensive than disk-based RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) storage. But do the advantages end there?

As data users are increasingly discovering, cheaper rarely means better. Inferior capacity and speed are not the only areas in which tape lags behind disk storage. Hard drives are more suited to harsher environments, and are very robust, while tape is more difficult to manage, can be prone to mishandling & misreading, raising the ongoing question of reliability of data backup.

Transportable RAID technology
Lou Lewis is a data-storage veteran who, along with a long-term business partner Paul Griffin has set up Storage Design Initiatives (SDi). SDi is the manufacturer of FieldPac, the world’s most advanced transportable RAID system.

Lou says: “You need 16, 17 or 18 tapes to do the same work as one FieldPac. The trouble with that, apart from storage, is that the operator has to label the tapes. If he doesn’t store or load them correctly, or if he drops them while they’re unlabelled, it causes huge problems.”

FieldPac, which can store and transport an impressive 24 Terabytes (TBs) of data, comes in its own flight case and is currently being rolled out with great effect to an oil-exploration company, a rail network and an airport-x-ray company, and has generated a lot of interest from the film industry which is rapidly moving from tape to digital.

Desert conditions
For all these applications, it’s the transportability of FieldPac that satisfies their particular market need.

For the oil-exploration company, working in difficult desert conditions, FieldPac collects and relocates data back to their base camp. The rail company uses FieldPac to capture data from every millimeter of track photographed from the underside of trains. In the case of the airport x-ray company, FieldPac is used for baggage screening for security purposes.

“Physically putting the FieldPac on an aeroplane is simply the quickest, most cost effective and secure way of transporting vast amounts of data that I know of,” says SDi’s Managing Director, Paul Griffin.