Solid State Disks: Hot Standby Mirrored Dual CF-Based Replacement Drive for Electro-Mechanical Storage Peripherals

Solid State Disks Ltd (SSD) has announced Hot Standby, a solid state, CompactFlash (CF)-based dual drive for replacing ageing and failed, SCSI-based, legacy electro-mechanical storage peripherals including HDD, magneto optical, tape and floppy drives.

Incorporating twin CF drives, Hot Standby enables the two CF cards to work as a mirrored pair providing increased resilience and fault-tolerance. The drive is presented to the host system as a single logical drive that will continue to operate if either of the CF cards fails. This also allows one CF card to be removed or dismounted for backup over the Ethernet port, giving a full disk image backup without dismounting the drive. The hot standby functionality ensures that any previously paired CF card, maintains a log file of the sectors written so that it can be used to re-synchronize with the removed or replaced second card to re-establish a mirrored pair.

For making full image backups, it also includes a remote dismount feature which operates independently from the control of the host system to enable any CF card in a mirrored pair to be taken offline with the minimum of operational interruption to the host. An image can be restored to a CF card either by inserting a backup CF card or writing to a CF card over the Ethernet port.

The Hot Standby drive integrates with SSD’s FLASH2GUI network software which is used for control and configuration as well as network backup and restore operations.

It is suited for use in process critical legacy computer systems where downtime for maintenance and backup causes major disruption and expense. These are found in industries including telecommunications, semiconductor manufacturing, industrial process control, engineering and manufacturing, power generation, oil and gas, military and aerospace, flight simulation and post-production.

The Hot Standby drive will be available in 50-pin, 68-pin and 80-pin variants supporting 2.5-inch, 3.5-inch or larger 5.25-inch form factors and operates with CF cards of up to 512GB in capacity.

“The announcement of the Hot Standby drive provides the ability to further future-proof the storage requirements of critical legacy computer systems that otherwise have plenty of life left in them but might have suffered a crucial storage peripherals failure,” said James Hilken, sales director, Solid State Disks. “As well as providing a solid state drop-in replacement for legacy electro-mechanical storage systems, Hot Standby provides the added benefit of greater resilience and fault-tolerance.“