"The ARAID solution makes it easy for us to help our IT clients upgrade their legacy equipment to provide reliable and stable data back-up solutions."

Ron Grzechowiak
Greznet, LLC

ARAID for the small office/home office

The ARAID provides small office and home office (SOHO) users with the same level of data protection traditionally only available in large enterprise environments. Unlike tape backup, where a hard disk failure means losing all work from the time of the last backup, with the ARAID all data is duplicated in real-time ensuring no data loss and no down time.

Since data is continuously mirrored between the two drives in the ARAID, one drive can be swapped out and taken off site for backup at any time. When the new drive is inserted, the ARAID automatically starts copying data to the new hard drive at a rate of 1GB per minute. Backups are now simple and can be performed in just a few minutes. Data recovery is just a simple – insert the restore-drive and reboot.

ARAID for factory automation

Factory automation, transaction processing, logistics and other production and control systems increasingly relies on computer control of operations. In these environments, costs of downtime is often measured in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ARAID provides effective protection against system downtime. By installing an ARAID in any system-critical PC, downtime due to disk failures is eliminated. If a disk fails, the ARAID continues to operate using the remaining good hard disk drive. The ARAID also supports email and SNMP notifications, allowing the system administrator to replace the failed hard drive within minutes. The ARAID is an ideal solution for operations in which down-time is not an option.

ARAID for the education and public access systems

In a system with public access such as a library, university or Internet Café, the ARAID can be used to ensure system uptime. The ARAID also allows the system to be automatically restored to a known state in case a user modifies the computer settings, installs unwanted software or otherwise tampers with the computer. Using an extra hard drive/tray assembly, a backup of the system configuration can be made. Then each morning, or as needed, the system can be restored to the known good state by rotating disk drives and rebooting off of the restore drive.

ARAID for OEMs and Systems Integrators

OEMs and Systems Integrators provide support to their clients on any problems they experience with their equipment. Using an ARAID in PC based systems can save hundreds of hours of support time and considerable customer frustration by eliminating downtime due hard disk failures. The improved systems reliability and easy to use backup of the ARAID translates into better service, happier customers and tech support cost savings.

Beyond disaster recovery to disaster prevention

RAID technology (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a method of using multiple hard disk drives to prevent data loss if one of the hard disk drives fails. The ARAID provides RAID 1 data protection in which two disk drives are used and all data is duplicated, or “mirrored” to both drives. In the event of a drive failure, the system continues to operate with no loss of data and no interruption of processing. The computer continues to operate as if nothing had happened. Instead of recovering from a disaster, the disaster has been prevented.

The ARAID will provide an alarm when a disk drive fails. The tray with the failed drive is simply removed from the ARAID, the failed HDD replaced and the tray reinserted into the ARAID. The ARAID recognizes the new drive and automatically starts copying data from the surviving drive to the new drive at a rate of 1GB per minute. All of this can be done with only a few minutes of effort and no system downtime, the computer continues to operate normally throughout the entire process. Without an ARAID, it can take hours or days to recover from a hard disk failure, and many times not all of your data can be recovered.

Accordance ARAID eliminates data loss due to hard disk failures

The disk mirroring technology utilized by the ARAID insures that both hard disk drives in the ARAID unit always contain exactly the same data. Each time data is written to the disk, the ARAID writes the data to both hard drives simultaneously. By performing the disk mirroring operations in hardware with the ARAID unit, all software bottlenecks or latencies are eliminated, so the two disk drives are always perfectly mirrored.

Accordance ARAID installs easily on any PC

Since the ARAID performs all RAID operations in hardware, it looks to the PC like a standard hard disk drive. As a result, installing an ARAID is just as easy as installing a hard disk drive. There is no software to install and the ARAID works with any operating system including Windows, Mac, Linux or Unix. While typically used with PCs, the ARAID will work with any computer that supports an IDE, SATA, USB or Fireware host interface.

Accordance ARAID replaces tape based backup

The ARAID hot-swap and automatic rebuild capability offer an attractive alternative to time-consuming and unreliable tape backups. Since data is continuously mirrored between the two drives in the ARAID, one drive can be swapped out and taken off site for backup at any time. When the new drive is inserted, the ARAID automatically starts copying data to the new hard drive at a rate of 1GB per minute.

Tape based tape backups are expensive, time consuming and error prone. Failure rates when restoring from tape backup runs from 30% to as high as 60% according to published studies! Even when successful, restoring from tape is a time consuming process. With the ARAID, backing up requires just a few minutes of time to swap trays. Restoring data is just as easy; simply turn off the computer, insert the restore-drive into the ARAID as the primary drive, and reboot. Additional drive/tray assemblies can be used to create a disk rotation providing multiple days of off-site backups.

Automatic notification of hard disk failures

The ARAID monitors the disk status, fan status and other operational parameters of the unit. Status information is provided by an easy to read backlit LCD display and disk failure alarms are providing using audio alarms, email alerts and SNMP traps. As soon as a disk fails, you will be notified allowing prompt replacement of the failed drive.

"The ARAID solution makes it easy for us to help our IT clients upgrade their legacy equipment to provide reliable and stable data back-up solutions."
Ron Grzechowiak
Greznet, LLC