Highly Reliable Systems Certified 4TB Hitachi and Seagate HDDs to Come in 1Q12

Highly Reliable Systems, Inc. of Reno, NV announced that their RAIDFrame DAS backup system will support Hitachi and Seagate 4TB hard drives when they ship (expected first quarter of 2012).

In RAID-0 mode each RAIDPac will hold 12TB of data, making it the largest removable backup cartridge.

A RAIDPac contains 3 drives and an integrated controller that travels with the backup cartridge. The system attaches directly to a fileserver or NAS with a single eSATA or USB 3.0 cable.

The company plans to release a specialty NAS with removable drive support based on Ubuntu Linux in the first quarter of 2012.

The RAIDFrame is available in 1-bay, 2-bay, and 5-bay enclosures. The 2-bay systems allow further redundancy by allowing two RAIDPacs to be mirrored; a configuration the company calls RAID-51. The use of hardware automatic mirroring technology means that swapping in a new RAIDPac initiates an additional block level copy of the primary backup. The RAIDFrame is designed for high capacity and rapid server recovery and provides a way to supplement or replace cloud and/or tape strategies.

RAIDPacs can be configured with RAID-0 for maximum speed or with RAID-5 to protect against single drive failures. When the Seagate and Hitachi 4TB drives ship they will increase RAIDPac capacities to 12TB/8TB (RAID-0/5).

According to Tom Hoops, the company CTO, no special drivers are needed since each RAIDPac is seen by the host system as a single removable hard drive. Unlike tapes a RAIDPac can be accessed directly in an emergency without the RAIDFrame enclosure. In addition to the standard self-centering connector designed for daily swap inside the RAIDFrame, each RAIDPac has SATA and USB 3.0 connections on the back.

Redundancy is achieved using RAID-5 and/or by mirroring to another RAIDPac. By using multiple cartridges (as with tapes – a new one each day in rotation), a history of full backups can be retained over time. The entire line has been upgraded to allow faster RAID-5, faster mirroring, and software management. Backup and restore performance exceeds 400GB per hour using imaging software on modern servers.

Highly Reliable Systems sells the product through resellers.

6TB RAIDPacs (containing three 2TB drives and RAID controller) are $1,208 MSRP.