Storage News

GM Looks To Accordance For Speedier RAID Conversion

GM recently called upon Accordance Systems when GM executives became concerned about failure of the systems' aging 3.5-inch hard drives and availability of the applications on them. Accordance sent the CRN Test Center one of its ARAID 3500 drive enclosures and with a RAID 1 array in place, the IOmeter began measuring transaction performance and throughput. CRN reports that using a 512 byte data file testing sequential reads against a single drive, Accordance was able to maximize performance at 2065 IOPS and 1.09 MBps, and with both drives configured as RAID 1, transactions jumped to 14,350 and throughput to 7.0 MBps, a performance improvement of just under seven-fold.

"But for GM, the ARAID 3500 was too big; most of the target machines didn't have two available drive bays. For such situations, Accordance in November began shipping the ARAID M300, which houses a pair of 2.5-inch SATA II drives in a single 5.25-inch drive bay and also is available with an IDE interface. ‘Using a ghosting utility, GM duplicated the contents of their desktop drives to the M300’s drive array,’ explained Accordance CEO Steve Johnson. ‘The M300 was then plugged to the computer’s primary IDE controller, which allowed the system to boot and operate normally without excessive downtime or loss of data,’ an experience that closely mirrors our own here in the CRN Test Center.”