Computerworld - SGI announced today it is releasing an upgrade to subsidiary Copan System's flagship MAID array, a new box that has four times the throughput, and double the disk storage density and disk-to-disk backup capability.
Coming four months after SGI purchased Copan, the new Copan 400 replaces the 300 model, offering up to 1792TB of capacity through as many as 896 2TB SATA hard drives.
The box, which uses MAID (massive array of idle disks) technology, has traditionally used only 25% of the hard drives at any one time so as to reduce energy costs and increase drive longevity.
The Copan 400 allows administrators to increase the number of active drives to 50% to increase throughput for near-line data retrieval.
The box, which was traditionally a virtual tape library (VTL), meaning an disk-array intermediary between backup servers and a tape library, can now act as a near-line backup storage device with disk-to-disk backup mode.
The Copan 400M array is compatible with IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager and Commvault's Simpana backup software, thus converting it into a disk-to-disk backup target. The Copan 400T/TX is the traditional VTL configuration.
As a disk-to-disk backup appliance, the array can achieve up to 6,400 MB/sec total throughput or up to 23TB per hour, or as a VTL, it can achieve up to 3,200MB/sec throughput.
The array can now also be managed through SGI's Data Migration Facility software, which automates the movement of data based on policy. So data that is less frequently is moved to inactive disk drives.
SGI did not offer any pricing information. The array is generally available today.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at 
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