Very interesting solution for editiing/archiving

[James Huenergardt]

I saw this at NAB and thought it was a great solution to the whole edit/archive issue.

ProMAX ProjectStor Storage and Archive System - 8TB Archive 4

They also have a Blu-Ray version instead of the LTO tape drive.

ProMAX ProjectStor Storage and Archive System - 8TB Blu-Ray

Anyone see this as well or have one?

[George Kroonder]

Since the unit only has 4 disk slots it will be using 2TB SATA disks for storage. With RAID5 you will "only" get 6TB effective storage capacity and much lower transfer speeds (especially on writes).

The integrated LTO or BD drive is nifty, but there are no technical advantages to putting it in the same housing.

George/

[Brett Sherman]

RAID 5's are good for active backups when you can't have any down time (ie: Websites, Business Servers, etc.) For backing up projects they are not a very good solution. RAID 5s are almost always tied to specific hardware. Unless you have a backup unit you will not be able to recover your backup if the drive unit dies. If a drive fails, you need the exact same model to replace it with. No RAID solutions protect against file system failures. That is so common that there are entire restoration companies that only recover from file system failures. A better solution is a nightly backup to a single drive.

[Steve Gibbons]

Cache-A (also at NAB) offers a similar product. They claim to be the first company selling LTO-5 tape drives in their appliances - LTO5 is 1.5TB native, 3TB compressed.

Cache-A Archive Appliances

[George Kroonder]

There are a number of errors in Bretts reply. I see these a lot, so I'm taking the opportunity to correct/nuance some of these misconceptions

RAID 5's are good for active backups when you can't have any down time.

RAID (of any kind) is not a backup, it protects against hardware failures of disks only. A backup will allow you to go "back in time" and get a good copy of the data back that, for whatever reason, went bad or missing. This is why it is important to have your backups "off site" or at the very least somewhere safe(er).

RAID 5s are almost always tied to specific hardware. Unless you have a backup unit you will not be able to recover your backup if the drive unit dies. If a drive fails, you need the exact same model to replace it with.

Hardware RAID (of any kind) is usually tied to the controller hardware and software RAID to the specific (Operating System) software or drivers, but modern systems no longer require failed drives to be replaced by identical models. As long as it is the same size or biger you're ok. Mixing wildly different drive is, however, not ideal.

Point in case is the popular DROBO drives; essentially this is an embedded system that uses software RAID to span volumes across multiple drives. You can then add or replace drives for bigger drives (one at a time!) to increase capacity.

A better solution is a nightly backup to a single drive.

Possibly, but in the case of (common) drive failure a RAID system will still have all the current data available. Mind you that in such a case a RAID5 system will be much slower; possibly too slow to do any real work on. Also keep in mind that when you replace the defective drive, the rebuild process can take a considerable ammount of time (days is not uncommon in large arrays) during which the array will possibly be even slower. RAID1 (or RAID10, aka mirrored stripe sets) systems will suffer almost no performance degradation during failure, but cost more capacity.

In RAID configurations there is no substitute for "spindles", aka the number of drives.

Backup and archival solutions are more than simple drive redundancy. Tape is still king here because of the proven reliability, large capacity and easy off site storage.

Instead of direct backup to tape, as in the olden days, now quite often backups are made to a disk system first and later offloaded to tape. The disks reduce backup time and provide easy access to restores of the latest backups. Tape is used for archival and off site storage.

Whatever you choose for redundancy, backup and archival solutions make sure that you protect your valuable assets in a way that brings the risk to your business down to an acceptable level.

George/