Storage start-up 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 CEO 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 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.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.