Copan MAID and VTL Revival at SGI

SGI announced the release of the SGI COPAN 400 platform, the next generation of the COPAN line of energy-efficient, persistent data storage solutions. As the first major update to the COPAN platform since SGI acquired COPAN Systems, Inc. in February of this year, COPAN 400 marks an improvement in performance, density and the ability to manage extremely large volumes of persistent data at significant savings for power utilization compared to conventional arrays.

"The COPAN 400 storage platform is a significant step forward in the development of energy-efficient solutions for creating cost-effective and secure active archives," said Rick Chapek, SGI senior vice president of hardware engineering. "It is a significant milestone, and reflects SGI’s commitment to maintain focus on advancing market leading storage solutions to manage persistent data."

COPAN 400 provides double the density of the previous generation COPAN product, with the capacity of nearly 1.8 petabytes in a single cabinet. In addition, COPAN 400 enables over four times the performance of its predecessor, with up to 23TB per hour in throughput at full bandwidth, while still enabling strict control over system power budgets.

COPAN 400 achieves savings in space and power compared with alternative archive offerings, which translates directly to reduced costs of operations in the data center. COPAN 400 is up to three times the density of competitive solutions, including EMC Centera, IBM Information Archive or Dell PowerVault DL2100 which cost from 3.5 to 7 times more.

By increasing density and significantly reducing power consumption, COPAN 400 enables unmatched flexibility for managing active archives. Additionally, by quadrupling the throughput, the platform provides clear advantages over tape-based solutions in enabling extremely fast backup and restore.

The COPAN storage platform utilizes Enhanced MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) with features like Power Managed RAID software. This enables COPAN 400 to minimize power consumption and provisioning by limiting the number of spinning drives to strict thresholds of as low as 25 percent at any time. IT managers will have the ability to increase that number to 50 percent to finely tune the system to provide the optimal mix of performance and power savings to best suit the needs of specific environments.

As a system purpose-built for extremely large, long-term persistent data stores, the COPAN platform includes features like Disk Aerobics, which proactively monitors data integrity and drive health. By using predictive drive maintenance, the system avoids lengthy RAID rebuilds by safely moving data to other drives before an error can occur.

COPAN 400 Platform Configurations
The product line includes 2 platforms:
COPAN 400T/TX is a VTL (Virtual Tape Library) implementation, which provides the benefits of the COPAN architecture while appearing to existing systems like a conventional tape library for easy integration with archive solutions such as DMF, SGI’s tiered virtualization solution.
COPAN 400M features native MAID for direct access to active archives and disk-to-disk solutions. It supports IBM Tivoli and CommVault Simpana. COPAN 400M works seamlessly with LiveArc, SGI’s digital asset management platform. This combination provides an extensible solution for active archive management, and integration with legacy storage silos.

SGI COPAN 400T is available immediately, COPAN 400M will be available later this year.

SGI also announced its membership in the Active Archive Alliance, a non-profit storage industry association dedicated to supporting the use of active archives for simplified, online access to all unstructured file data.

The Active Archive Alliance provides organizations with best practices, tools and information to achieve simplified access to online storage of their archived data. Building on a legacy of delivering innovative solutions to help customers manage massive archives, SGI’s membership in the Alliance further demonstrates SGI’s commitment to address the growing challenge of effectively managing the exponential growth of persistent data, across industries.

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