Solid State Disks Adds Ethernet Backup Capability to SCSI-Flash Drives

Solid State Disks Ltd has announced a Ethernet-based backup and restore capability for its family of Compact Flash (CF) SCSI-Flash SSDs, providing further storage future-proofing for critical legacy computer applications that otherwise have plenty of life left in them.

The SCSI-Flash CF drive is targeted at a range of computer-based legacy applications where critical SCSI-based storage drives are becoming more and more difficult to repair or replace as they increasingly age and fail. As a direct, drop-in replacement, SCSI-Flash provides an up-to-date, high-reliability, solid-state and low-cost solution to the problem. SCSI-Flash targets a spectrum of industries and markets including telecommunications, semiconductor manufacturing, industrial process control, engineering and manufacturing, oil and gas, power generation, mil/aero, flight simulation and post-production applications.

The SCSI-Flash backup and restore capability enables vital backups to be made as a complete disk image of its CF card at any given point in time and transferred via an Ethernet network to be stored remotely from the legacy equipment and restored as and if needed. Universal TCP is used for disk image transfers with remote execution of backup and restore configuration operations controlled by user API or via a web browser and auto-online implemented on backup completion.

The SCSI-Flash Ethernet backup and restore capability generates savings in time and expense in the face of process outages. In semiconductor manufacturing, for example, process outages can cost in excess of $1,000/$100,000 per hour/day. In the telecommunications industry they may incur considerable fines.

The CF SCSI-Flash Ethernet backup and restore capability can also be used to replace traditional manual rotation of media with remote download of manufacturing files so that, for example, a CNC machine knows what program to run for a particular session or a semiconductor fab which recipe to use.

SCSI-Flash is a programmable replacement solution, enabling the SCSI device implementation nuances of all equipment manufacturers to be emulated. SCSI-Flash combines SCSI drive architectures (SASI, SCSI-1, SCSI-2) with industry-standard, solid state CF card technology to provide a high-reliability, solid state replacement for any style of SCSI-based drive including HDD, magneto-optical, tape and floppy drives. The SCSI-Flash drive supports CF cards up to 256GB and utilizes a 3.5-inch form factor (or larger 5.25-inch form factor). It is available in two package types either with or without an externally removable card. Sector sizes available are 256, 512, 768, 1,024 and 2,048 bytes per sector.

Screenshot of SCSIFlash windows network GUI.
Also available as Command Line Interface (CLI)
to work for non-windows O/S integration.

Click to enlarge

“The Ethernet backup and restore facility adds an important new capability to SCSI-Flash which has been developed in response to the demand from customers,” said James Hilken, director, sales, Solid State Disks. “There are plenty of critical legacy systems in a variety of industry that are potentially nearing end-of-life simply because their storage devices are becoming too difficult to repair or replace as they age and fail. SCSI-Flash provides a low-cost solution to this. The new Ethernet backup and restore capability gives the added benefit of being able take snapshots of the data and keep it offline from the legacy equipment with the option to restore at a later date, if necessary.”