March 30th, 2020            Click here to download the PDF file

New Product Coming up: Gamma Carry Will Make a Debut
in May, 2020!

Thinking forward to overcome the bottlenecks of existing storage devices, as well as providing faster and more convenient storage solutions for 4K video editing have always been Accusys' consistent goals. To address the needs of a highly competitive market, practicality and cost-effectiveness have become two primary considerations for designing new products. Based on years of industry experience and continuously accumulated customer feedback, a RAID system that’s more user-friendly than ever—Gamma Carry—was born. Not only is it perfect for post-production editing, but it is also specially made for DIT (Digital Imaging Technician) and users who need storage portability.

To break through the framework of existing products on the market, Gamma Carry adopts a variety of innovative designs, including two Accusys’ proprietary patented technologies: LED on/off function and HDD positioning pin.

1）LED on/off Function: When working in the darkroom, instead of taping up the LED lights that gleam and break your concentration, you can now simply press a button to turn the lights off.

2）Positioning Pin: The newly designed disk tray positioning pin can reduce risk of damage to the disks and backplane caused by shock or vibration during transportation. What's even better is that with the HDD positioning technology you don't have to remove the hard disks before you set out.

3）SSD Reader: With optional SSD portable trays (up to 2), Gamma Carry can transform into a 6-bay or 7-bay RAID system with 1 or 2 SSD reader(s), which allows you to quickly transfer your data from SSD to RAID or vice versa. It is also compatible with 2.5” hard disk.

4）Handlebar: Being the world’s smallest 3.5” 8-bay RAID system, you can easily take it anywhere you go by its handlebar.

5）Pelican Case: Gamma Carry fits in a Pelican 1510 Protector Carry-On Case. Hand carry it or check it in when you need to fly. Pelican Case meets most of the airline hand-carry luggage regulations.

6）User-serviceable Part Modules: Only 2 easy steps and you can replace the power and fan modules yourself, no technician needed.

Employing the latest Thunderbolt 3 technologies, Gamma Carry has two Thunderbolt 3 ports. Launched together with Gamma Carry, ExaSAN Carry has dual Thunderbolt 3 ports and one additional PCIe 3.0 port, with which data transfer between Mac and PC becomes no sweat at all. Moreover, ExaSAN Carry can be more than just a DAS solution. With the world's first and only PCIe SAN switch, SW16-G3, optimized scalability and large group collaborative workflows become possible.

Gamma Carry and ExaSAN Carry come with the same excellent performance and stability as all of our products, and they go way beyond that to make breakthroughs in both functions and externals. We hope that when you are using Gamma Carry and ExaSAN Carry, you will enjoy the unrivaled experience.

Case Study: HA-AP Appliance in a Large Cigarette Factory
in China -- Part 3 of 3

Preface

In the last two issues of newsletter we discussed about the challenges of a cigarette factory (or “CSCF” for short) in guaranteeing its data protection and business continuity. The CSCF technical team eventually decided on the HA-AP high-availability storage architecture to protect against any single-point of failure in the storage system. So far, the CSCF new data center has been running flawlessly for four months since November 2019. What changes has the new data center brought to the core business system of CSCF? Let’s take a look together.

Solution

With HA-AP Appliance in place, the CSCF data center has perfected its infrastructure of host, network, and storage layers to support a high-level of business continuity; the same-site active-active data center delivers a total solution, providing core data centralization, high-availability protection, and intelligent data management for all business platforms. The overall architecture of the CSCF data center is as follows:

1）Two Lenovo DE6000H storage systems at the back-end, are mapped via HA-AP Appliance as one logical storage to the hosts; that is, the physical existence of the redundant storage systems is transparent to the servers and applications.

2）Two Lenovo B6505 enterprise-grade Fibre Channel switches, are used to form a network of redundant data paths for back-end storage systems.

3）A VMware cluster that consists of eight Lenovo servers at the front-end, accessing the Lenovo DE6000H storage systems through redundant paths of the SAN.

4）A cluster of dual HA-AP engines that connects the front and back ends guarantees redundant paths from each server to the storages, and handles instantaneous failover upon any single point of failure without human intervention; guaranteeing no downtime "7x24" business continuity. Data from the servers is replicated synchronously to both Lenovo DE6000H storage systems via HA-AP, the mirrored structure provides guaranteed protection of data.

CSCF Active-active SAN Architecture

Benefits: High-level Data Protection and Zero-downtime
Business Continuity

After the deployment of the new data center was completed, a fully redundant storage system with active-active data access is in place to protect against any single point of failure and guarantee CSCF business continuity: instantaneous and automatic failover upon any single point of failure ensures zero-downtime "7x24" business continuity, while synchronized data replication provides up-to-date data redundancy; which dramatically improves data availability and data protection.