COPAN Systems Combines Data De-Duplication with MAID to Deliver Unprecedented Cost Savings to the Enterprise

Business Wire, Oct 9, 2007

Revolution 300 Series for Persistent Data Provides Increased Capacity, Scalability, Flexibility and Performance

LONGMONT, Colo. -- COPAN Systems, the industry leader in cost-effective storage solutions for the protection and management of persistent data, today announced the availability of its next-generation MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) based product line, the Revolution 300 series. By combining advantages of its enhanced MAID platform with the power of data de-duplication for the first time, COPAN Systems enables enterprises to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of managing the rapidly growing volumes of persistent data. The Revolution 300 series offers the industry's densest, most cost-effective storage solution available, while providing the scalability and flexibility that large corporations demand in managing massive volumes of data.

Enterprises today are faced with exponential increases in the amount of persistent data - defined as write once, read occasionally data - that IT departments are tasked with protecting in the face of declining IT budgets. Uniquely optimized for persistent data, COPAN Systems' enhanced MAID platform only powers up drives when requested by the application and ensures no more than 25 percent of the densely packed drives are ever turned on at the same time. This enables customers to reduce power and cooling costs by at least 75 percent, as well as reduce the solution footprint, and significantly increase the life of the disks.

By adding enterprise class data de-duplication capabilities to the MAID platform, COPAN Systems can eliminate redundant data, offering customers cost savings that have been previously unavailable with disk storage systems. The MAID/de-duplication combination of the Revolution 300T(X) provides secure and reliable access to unmatched capacity of more than 6 PB of persistent data within a single chassis at a price per GB below traditional tape systems, as low as 25 cents/GB. Purpose built for large enterprise architectures, the Revolution 300 Series provides a central repository for customers' persistent data with new benchmarks for storage and power density.

"There has perhaps been no hotter category of storage than data de-duplication over the last year, and its merits are well documented. By adding MAID into this equation, COPAN Systems is redefining the storage economics of managing persistent data, particularly for the needs of large enterprises," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst for Taneja Group. "COPAN is uniquely positioned to help enterprise customers realize the dramatic effect this combination can deliver, further strengthening the space, power and overall cost savings organizations are now able to achieve."

Revolution 300T(X) virtual tape library (VTL) leverages FalconStor's enterprise, single instance repository (SIR) technology to provide 20x or greater data compression rates. By performing data de-duplication post-process instead of inline, customers realize throughput rates of 800 MB/second, avoiding any performance bottleneck issues which are particularly important for large enterprises with continuous backup windows. The Revolution 300T(X) with data de-duplication offers unmatched replication and recovery to and from remote data centers for disaster recovery, providing up to 95 percent reduction on bandwidth required for data transfer.

"FalconStor is proud to be teaming up with COPAN Systems to further advance the business benefits of the MAID architecture," said ReiJane Huai, CEO, FalconStor Software. "FalconStor will continue to MAID-enable its mission-critical storage services such as replication, archiving, and WORM to help corporate IT maximize business continuity with minimal equipment and operating cost."

In addition to the Revolution 300T(X), COPAN Systems is introducing enhancements to the company's archiving (Revolution 300A) and native MAID (Revolution 300M) products as part of the Revolution 300 series. The Revolution 300A provides full feature archiving, integrated data movement and access security controls. The Revolution 300M offers customers the same benefits seen throughout the product series without the need for a separate processing layer to host the disk personality, enabling the seamless integration with disk-based third party solutions.

The Revolution 300 series products offer the following overarching platform enhancements:

* Capacity: With the introduction of 750 GB drives, COPAN Systems increases the overall raw capacity to 672 TB per chassis.

* Scalability: New, enterprise class, data de-duplication capabilities on the Revolution 300T(X) offer effective usable capacity that can exceed 6 PB, meeting the persistent data requirements of large corporations.

* Flexibility: Customers can now house multiple personalities within a single chassis, providing data management, power and cooling benefits. It also serves as a platform for future enhancements that move data from one persistent data product to another.