CompactFlash drive replaces legacy electro-mechanical storage peripherals
Storage systems design, development and integration specialist, Solid State Disks, has announced Hot Standby, a solid state, CompactFlash-based dual drive to replace ageing and failed SCSI-based legacy electro-mechanical storage systems including hard disk, magneto optical, tape and floppy drives.
The HotStandby drive incorporates twin CompactFlash drives, and enables the two CompactFlash (CF) cards to work as a mirrored pair providing increased resilience and fault-tolerance, explains Solid State Disks. The drive is presented to the host system as a single logical drive that will continue to operate seamlessly if either of the CF cards fails. This also allows one CF card to be removed or dismounted for back-up over the Ethernet port, giving a full disk image back-up 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 quickly re-synchronise with the removed or replaced second card to re-establish a mirrored pair.
For making full image back-ups, it also includes a remote dismount feature which operates independently from the control of the host system. This enables any CF card in a mirrored pair to be taken offline with minimal operational interruption to the host. An image can be restored to a CF card either by inserting a back-up 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 back-up and restore operations.
The Hot Standby drive can be used in process critical legacy computer systems where downtime for maintenance and back-up is disruptive and expensive, such as 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-, 68- and 80-pin variants supporting 2.5-, 3.5- or 5.25-inch form factors and operates with CF cards of up to 512Gbyte in capacity.
