Copan takes on conventional storage

You may remember that just two years ago, Copan began shipping the Revolution 200T, an archiving system that emulates tape libraries by using cabinets filled to the brim with SATA drives. The Revolution was the first system to pack almost 900 SATA drives into a single cabinet and to complement that exceptionally dense capacity with management software for great reliability and low power and cooling requirements. (Here’s a quick recap of how the Revolution works.)

The 200T was a success, but judging from a recent conversation I had with Senior Vice President of Marketing Roget Archibald and CTO Aloke Guha, Copan is working on another revolution that could secure the vendor a much larger bite of the storage pie.

The company is now targeting the large amount of non-transactional data — Copan calls that “persistent data” — or information for which immediate access is not needed. According to Archibald, only 10 percent to 20 percent of the data in a datacenter is transactional; the rest is all persistent data.

“If you are using a Symmetrix or any other system designed for fast response times to store persistent data, you are not making an efficient use of resources,” Guha adds.

Copan is proposing a new architecture, dubbed PDSA (persistent data storage architecture) that will keep transactional data on high performance devices while automatically moving persistent data to a less expensive platform, such as (you guessed it) a Revolution box.

How do you decide which data to move? Copan suggests analyzing age and recovery time, plus the probability of reuse as migration criteria. For example, a new customer order is likely to be modified and should stay on fast-access devices, but after 30 days it probably won’t change anymore and should be moved to a less expensive storage layer. Similarly, very old data or data that is unlikely to be accessed or modified should move from the fast-access layer to an actual tape reel for vaulting.

After you hammer out which data goes where, you’ll need an application to migrate the data across layers. That’s where the partnerships that Copan is currently pursuing come into play: For example, to move persistent data residing in your Oracle database away from primary storage, you would use Oracle ILM Assistant. To prune files in a Veritas Storage Foundation shop, you would use Symantec data moving applications. Other Copan partners include FalconStor (VTL and replication), IBM (Tivoli Storage Manager), and Revivio (Continuous Data Protection).

Although it’s blatantly self-serving, Copan PDSA has the potential to significantly cut the cost of storage, reducing the amount of expensive fast-access storage and replacing that with less expensive and more easily managed devices. I give them another thumbs-up for taking a more comprehensive approach to storage management and including both structured and unstructured data.

I’m torn, however, over the multiple partner applications to move data. The heavy dependence on partners is a double-edged sword: On one hand, customers are free to use applications of their choosing, but it can be a drag for customers who don’t see their applications supported.

However, Archibald is quite confident that many more partners will join Copan’s march after the formal product announcement. We’ll see.

Join me on The Storage Network with questions or comments.