Copan readying new storage Revolutions

Storage startup Copan Systems has ambitious plans for the upcoming months, according to senior company executives. The plans include the release of three new products, a number of tie-ups with other storage players and a ramping up of the firm’s international operations.

“Over the next few months, we’re going to show the real power of the MAID (massive array of idle disks) architecture for backup, archiving and specialty applications in tiered storage,” Dave Davenport, president and chief executive officer of Copan, said in a recent interview. “We’re going to have new software and capabilities.”

Copan made waves last year in the storage industry with the release of its Revolution 200T disk-based library which emulates a virtual tape library and targets enterprise users. The MAID technology only powers up and spins disks when customers need to either save data to disk or access information held on the media both prolonging disk life and lowering power consumption, according to Davenport.

Revolution 200T includes what Copan dubs Disk Aerobics, monitoring and management software designed to anticipate which disks may fail so that data can be rebuilt on spare drives before the suspect disk actually fails. “Before, it would’ve taken days to reconstruct a [failed] disk, but we can automatically copy the data over to another disk, so it only takes a few minutes to move that data to a new disk,” Davenport said.

Every 30 days, Revolution 200T spins disks to check their functionality. Copan customers typically only require one annual service call to replace failed disks and ensure the system has sufficient spare disks, according to Roger Archibald, Copan’s vice president of marketing and business development. “The system can also call home if it’s running out of good disks,” he said.

Revolution 200T has a three-tiered systems architecture and includes what Copan calls Power Managed RAID, full RAID 5 data protection software that spins the drives when they’re needed.

Now, the company is planning to debut other Revolution-branded products based on the MAID technology. “When we first came out with Revolution, we knew we had an uphill battle for a while,” Davenport said. “We wanted to get validated so our first version [of the Revolution product] was a virtual tape library, a very low risk strategy.”

“About one-third of our customers are using Copan for archiving as well as backup,” Archibald said. “In the latter part of this year, we’ll release a more file-oriented product specifically targeting archiving.” Other Revolution products will focus on improvements in the areas of disaster recovery and compliance, he added.

Later this month, Copan will unveil version 3.0 of Disk Aerobics which will feature a proactive fail capability as well as Disk Scrubber, according to Archibald. “If Disk Scrubber sees a bad sector, it will reconstruct the data and write it to a different place,” he said. The company will also be offering remote replication from one Copan system to a second remote Copan system or from a Copan system to a traditional tape system over Fiber Channel or via a Fiber Channel over Internet Protocol (FCIP) extension, he said. By the end of this year, Copan will offer native IP connectivity, Archibald added.

Over the coming next few months, Copan expects to announce some significant OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deals, according to Davenport. Additionally, a number of leading storage software vendors are working to modify their products so that they run natively on Copan’s MAID architecture not as tape emulation as they do now, Archibald said. He expects Copan and the as-yet-unnamed software companies to make a joint announcement on this front in the first quarter of 2006, he added.

Copan has about 30 customers in the financial sector, health care, media and three national laboratories, according to Archibald. The users include Baptist Memorial Healthcare, Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Time Warner Cable. Copan announced Tuesday that its products now manage more than 2.5 petabytes of customers’ data.

With a staff of over 12,000, the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) based in Galveston uses Revolution 200T to back up more than 300 non-storage area network (SAN)-attached servers containing some 60 terabytes of financial, academic and patient data.

UTMB’s IT setup is split between storage software from Symantec Corp.’s Veritas division and EMC Corp.’s Legato business, according to Matt Johnson, senior software systems specialist at UTMB. The organization has a mix of operating systems — Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 from Sun Microsystems Inc. and Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 from Microsoft Corp. Most of UTMB’s servers have gigabit public and private connections to a 10-gigabit backbone. The center has three tape libraries including a Dell Inc. 136T (an eight-drive LT01) and a Sun StorageTek L180 (a six-drive LT02), he wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

UTMB installed Copan’s Revolution 200T in the spring of this year as “a near-line/high-availability backup solution,” Johnson wrote.

Why did the organization chose Copan? “Aside from the reduced footprint and cost and performance increase, the strongest factor was the high level of experience of the support staff,” he wrote. As to the major benefits UTMB has experienced to date with Revolution 200T, Johnson cites “extremely fast backup and restore times as well as more than five weeks of on-hand backups.” The center has been able to cut the time spent on backups and restores from a full night and into the following business day to 4.5 hours and only one person now needs to administer the system, he said in a Copan release.

Although Revolution 200T was integrated into UTMB’s disaster recovery plan, the organization didn’t need to carry out any system restores in relation to the recent hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast, Johnson wrote.

Johnson welcomed Copan’s plans to come out with new Revolution products.

“MAID architecture by design will provide a number of features that to this point were nonexistent,” Johnson wrote. “I am using the Copan [system] for the sole purpose of backing up our non-SAN-attached servers. I would like to explore the possibility of taking full advantage of MAID architecture in future projects.”

Privately held Copan launched as a company back in December 2002 and has been selling its tape library mainly into the U.S. market since August 2004. The firm opened its European headquarters in London in July of this year and Tuesday announced the appointment of two vice president of sales — one London-based for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and the other based in Hong Kong for Asia-Pacific.

Copan currently employs 70 people, but CEO Davenport expects headcount to grow to 80 by the end of the year.

To date, Copan has raised US$39 million in venture capital funding from investors including Pequot Ventures, Pinnacle Ventures and Austin Ventures. “We will probably look at some additional equity investment some time next year,” Davenport said. “We have no defined timeline.” Copan plans to “go cash positive in the second half of next year,” Archibald added.

Although Copan started out with Hitachi Computer Products (America) Inc. manufacturing Revolution 200T, the arrangement didn’t work out and was terminated by mutual agreement, according to Davenport. Copan is currently finalizing the move of its manufacturing to Sanmina-SCI Corp., he said. Going with Sanmina, a general-purpose electronics contract manufacturer, instead of one focused on the storage market “allows us to scale to a greater level,” Davenport added.

The Copan name comes from the Copan Ruins in Central America, an archeological site dating back to the Mayan era, according to company information in print and on the Web. Because the site’s artifacts were well-preserved and yielded much information about the Mayan civilization, the firm thought the name Copan an excellent moniker to apply to an organization specializing in long-term storage.