Virtual tape library firm targets UK

Virtual tape library specialist Copan has launched in Europe by opening a headquarters in London. The move makes Copan's Sata disk backup technology a new option for UK firms.

Copan's Maid (Massive Array of Idle Disks) system is compatible with a range of tape backup software, but instead of relying on tape drives it uses an array of Serial ATA (Sata) disk drives to store data.

Unlike other Sata-based disk arrays, Copan's 224TB capacity Revolution 200T system switches off drives while they are not in use. Dave Davenport, Copan's chief technology officer, said this greatly improves the reliability and working life of the disk drives.

"Sata disks were designed to be switched off, or power-managed, on a regular basis. Serial ATA drives are rated at about a third of the reliability of SCSI drives, but if you manage the power properly you can get four times the reliability out of each drive," said Davenport.

Davenport said Copan was founded in 2002, and so far has over two petabytes of products installed with over 20 customers.

"Chicago Mercantile Exchange is one of our customers. It looked at its backup recovery success rate and found 25 percent failure rate of not getting backups made or not being able to restore them. It installed our Revolution 200T in September and since then has had zero failures of backup or restore jobs and has never needed a service call for the Revolution 200T," he said.

Davenport added that data checking procedures reduce the likelihood of having to rebuild the Raid array, thus avoiding a process that can take a lot of time.