Winchester Adds Mirroring to RR2P Rugged Removable Canister Disk Arrays

Winchester Systems Inc. announced that their RR2 Removable Canister disk arrays offers Canister Mirroring – the ability to write the same data on each of two removable canisters simultaneously.

“Now ISR missions can protect valuable data by writing two copies to protect irreplaceable data,” according to Joe Sanzio, CTO, Winchester Systems. “It also lets the ground crew send one canister to a safe location immediately while the reconnaissance and surveillance data on the other canister is analyzed for mission results,” he emphasized. Fresh canisters can then be quickly inserted into the system in the mobile vehicle for rapid redeployment. “Finally,” he added: “advanced ISR applications use all the CPU power available and the RR2P performs the mirroring within the storage system without taxing the server.”

Each rugged removable canister holds ten 2.5″ HDD or SSD drives with capacities up to 2TB each. In capturing high resolution imaging data, recording speed is of the essence and the RR2P delivers up to 2,200MB/s data throughput. Canister Mirroring is implemented as RAID-10, where the same data is striped across all ten drives in each canister. Striping is critical for read and write speeds, as all 10 drives in each canister are used in parallel.

The RR2P is lightweight 2U RAID disk array chassis made of milled aluminum, weighting 48 pounds with HDDs and 44 pounds with SSDs in two removable canisters. All ten disks in a canister are carried as a single unit by a handle for safe transport and locks into place with a positive locking lever. Reliable canister connectors are military grade for field usage and are mounted to float to protect against shock and vibration.

Designed for harsh environments, each canister includes an easy-to-replace filter that protects against ambient dust and humidity. For added confidence in these environments, the RR2P canisters are each equipped with a real-time LCD status display that alerts the operator to any malfunction including temperature, controller, disk drives and other factors so that immediate remedial action can be taken to keep the mission on track.

The RR2P is a configurable 8Gb FC 8GB hosted product, with two ports per canister, that offer options including AC or DC power supplies variety of disk and SSD storage alternatives. It is conveniently only 17″ wide to mount with a variety of standard rackmount rails and offers optional base plate mounting screws for secure lockdown to the vehicle.

White paper on RR2P entitled, Field Proven Rugged RR2P Pluggable Canister RAID is Right for Military Surveillance (registration required).

Prices for RR2P disk arrays start at under $40,000. Products are available, are built to order and delivery is 8-12 weeks.