Storage Design Initiatives (SDI) Launches FieldPac

Storage Design Initiatives, a storage technology design house, is asking, 'Can tape still cut it?'.
The company believes RAID data storage is more logical and practical than tape-based systems and now it's gone portable, big-style, with the launch of the FieldPac transportable RAID system.
For years, tape has been the medium of choice for data storage managers. Yes, it's less expensive than disk-based RAID storage. But do the advantages end there?
As data users are increasingly discovering, cheaper rarely means better. Inferior capacity and speed aren't 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 and misreading, raising the ongoing question of reliability of data backup.
With this in mind, data-storage veteran, Lou Lewis, teamed up with long-term business partner Paul Griffin to launch Storage Design Initiatives (SDI), manufacturer of FieldPac, the world's most advanced transportable RAID system.
Lou said: "You need 16, 17 or 18 tapes to do the same work as one FieldPac. The trouble, apart from storage, is that the operator must label the tapes. If he/she doesn't store or load them correctly, or drops them while unlabelled, it causes huge problems."
FieldPac, which can store and transport 24 terabytes (TBs) of data, comes in its own flight case and is currently being introduced with significant benefits to an oil exploration company, a rail network and an airport X-ray company. It has also generated considerable interest from the film industry which is rapidly moving from tape to digital.
For all these applications, the transportability of FieldPac is satisfying a particular market need.
For the oil-exploration company, working in difficult desert conditions, FieldPac collects and relocates data back to its base camp. The rail company uses FieldPac to capture data from every millimetre ot 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.
Paul Griffin, SDI's Managing Director, said: "Physically putting the FieldPac on an aeroplane is simply the quickest, most affordable and secure way of transporting vast amounts of data that we have witnessed.
"Faced with transportable disk-based technology of this calibre, it's no wonder that industry insiders are asking whether tape can still cut it these days."
Further information is available at: www.sdinitiatives.com.
(KMcA/JM)