Silent Bricks by FAST LTA

Backup to disk has clear advantages over conventional backup to tape: The data can be randomly accessed and long positioning times during reading are eliminated. This saves a lot of time in an emergency. Tapes can be stored for a long time and can be easily taken off-site.
FAST LTA has combined the advantages of both technologies. The data is stored on so-called Silent Bricks, which consist of hard disks but can be removed during operation. In order to ensure the longest possible storage time, data is written redundantly to a total of 12 2.5" disks, for example as 8+4 Erasure Coding. Thus, the data is still readable, even if one third of all hard disks should no longer function. In addition, disks from different manufacturers and batches are mixed in order to be protected against serial errors.
The Silent Bricks are operated by a controller which, together with five brick slots, is housed in a rack enclosure. Further shelves with 14 slots each extend the system. If individual bricks do not have to be accessed for a longer period of time, they can simply be removed and stored. In this way, any amount of data can be archived without power consumption. Also revision-safe archiving of the data is supported by a patented WORM technology.
The Silent Brick Drive, the little brother of the Silent Brick Controller, is ideal for the backup of branch offices. Thus, the data can be locally backed up or archived and then remotely backed up via asynchronous replication to a brick in the head office. Any number of branches or departments can thus outsource their backups. The system, which is only one height unit in size, can accommodate two of the Silent Bricks, of course also WORM Bricks.