RAID-1 Controller for Industrial PC From Accordance

Accordance Systems announced the availability of the new ARAID M200 RAID 1 Controller that provides back-up and security capabilities for industrial and embedded applications where 100% uptime is an essential. The ARAID M20 supports both eSATA and SATA.

“The ARAID M200 is the perfect back-up solution for demanding industrial applications,” said Steve Johnson, president of Accordance USA. “The M200 is designed to provide highly reliable RAID hard disk data protection to any industrial PC or controller solution. The M200 behaves just like a single hard disk but constantly mirrors data onto two hard drives assuring that your system is protected in the event a drive should fail.”

By using the ARAID M200, system integrators and solution developers can design in highly reliable, high performance RAID back-up in a compact 1U height. During operation, all data is copied to two 2.5” disks seated in the ARAID M200. If either drive fails, the system continues running on the surviving drive and alerts you of the event. There is no downtime for the system. Replacing the failed drive is easy with the ARAID sliding drive trays and can be changed while the system is running.

By using the M200 it is now possible to have two hard drives in the space usually occupied by a single 3.5-inch desktop hard drive or a CD/DVD drive. All BIOS and operating systems view the ARAID 2200 as a simple drive and treat it accordingly. There is no need for drivers or any other applications. The M200 can work with almost any operating system including Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris, BSD, SCO Open Server, Netware, etc. Plug and play design enables connection to eSATA or SATA interfaces with a choice of standard 5-volt or 12-volt power connections.

The new M200 supports hot swap and ARF, has a built-in lock to secure the hard drives, and uses a 40 mm high performance cooling fan that effectively ventilates high speed 7200 RPM drives. The management and monitoring systems include a LCD panel display with system status, disk operations, temperature, disk read & write status, audible alarms for impending disk and cooling problems, and SNMP Agent for Windows and Linux systems that provides enterprise MIB, MIB II and Trap support.

All ARAID processing is handled on the ARAID device controller independent of the computer’s main processor. Most onboard RAID and PCI RAID tax cycles from the motherboard CPU.

ARAID creates a RAID 1 array on the fly from an existing drive, with no danger of losing data. Contrast this with typical RAID controllers that require the user to destroy, and then create an array from scratch.

Typical RAID 1 solutions are not considered to be a backup solution. While data is replicated, it is not safe from viruses, spyware, etc. An ARAID is different because you can remove a drive from the unit and replace it with another drive within seconds. The removed drive can be treated as a backup and taken off-site for secure storage. The ARAID recognizes the new drive and immediately begins to mirror all data to it. Most ARAID users buy 1 to 7 spare trays and rotate backups offsite in a similar manner as tape.

The ARAID M200 internal eSATA hard drive is $379/each. Volume discounts are available. SATA and USB external devices are available as well.