Storage system has ergonomic design

Electronics Times, Nov 22, 1999

The Midas data recorder system, from Acal Electronics, has been designed for use with Fibre Channel disk arrays and offers terabytes of realtime permanent recording of digital data at continuous rates of up to 100Mbyte/s.

Capable of being integrated into a VME chassis, the recorder comes with ready-to-run software for data acquisition and storage management, with support for Windows NT, 98 and 95, Solaris and VxWorks hosts. There are three versions available, with the MDR-120 providing two PMC positions and a single DRAM for both input and output data. It is capable of around 30 to 50Mbyte/s realtime storage to disks and is the entry-level system.

The MDR-220 is a high-performance base unit with two PMC positions plus two high-speed DRAM buffers that can be used in a 'swinging buffer' fashion. Fully controlled by the MDR software, this process ensures contention-free input and output data flows during recording and playback, and makes a continuous throughput of up to 100Mbyte/s possible.

Using the same 'swinging buffer' base unit, the MDR-250 has five PMC positions for more interconnect functionality and better use of the PCI bandwidth. A typical PMC population for this system would be two DPIO digital parallel I/O modules, one for recording and one for playback, an Ethernet PMC for host network access and a SCSI PMC for tape station attachment and the archiving of data to tape.

Acal Electronics
Tel: 01252 868757
Fax: 01252 858003
Enquiry No 580