July 2000

BRIGHT IDEAS

Edited By Maria Medina

Ask the Right RAID Questions

Consider Quality, Performance and Service

Shopping for a RAID system can be simple once you know what you need and understand what the technology can offer. All RAID systems provide a level of storage, reliability, performance and serviceability. Your job is to determine the best fit for you. Following are tips to help you assess construction quality, performance and service.

1. Quality. All-metal disk carriers offer the thermal conductivity needed for proper heat dissipation for today’s high-speed, high capacity disk drives that often run hot and require proper operating environments. Proper cooling is critical to achieve long and reliable disk drive life, and metal carriers simply do this better.

Metal carriers also shield the disk drives’ high-speed signals from stray RFI (radio frequency interference) that may occur in an office or computer room. For 18 GB drives and high-speed 10,000 rpm drives, it is important to minimize drive vibration to avoid excessive disk errors and time-consuming retries. A quality mounting scheme will ensure reliable operation of these drives.

2. Performance. Will the RAID system give you the performance you need? At today’s competitive prices, you can buy systems that give you more than 9,000 disk read/write operations per second for transaction-oriented applications and up to 35 Mbyte/sec sustained throughput for data transfer operations. If a vendor is not providing anything near these specifications, your applications will run slow needlessly.

Today’s computers process data in near zero time. Thus, server applications run in proportion to the speed of the slowest device, which is typically the mechanical disk drive. Ask vendors for the performance specifications of their RAID systems and compare. If vendors are clueless or do not publish their specifications, you can be assured that they do not measure up.

3. Service. Can your people service the unit, or must you rely only on outside service providers? How easy is it to replace disk drives, power supplies, fans and controllers? Can any moderately skilled technician perform these component replacements? How quickly can the components be replaced? Are they “hot-swap” replacements, meaning can they be done while the system is still delivering data to users? Does the vendor have onsite service available? Do they have a toll-free hotline staffed by people who actually know the equipment? Is the service available 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Can you or a highly trained factory engineer dial into your system from a remote site? Can your system automatically alert you via a pager in the event of a warning or error condition?

Joel Leider is the CEO of Winchester Systems (www.winsys.com), in Woburn, MA.

Image Conversion

Image conversion is one of the most important elements of successful workflow integration. Unfortunately, it is often an afterthought left to untrained and undersupervised staff. This is a formula for failure — one that yields slow and unreliable system throughput and personnel problems. Follow these steps for success.

1. Review document handling. Take a look at classification, storage, retrieval, security and distribution of your documents to get a sense of the organization’s needs.

2. Identify sources. Where is the information that needs to be converted? Is it on paper, microfilm, tape, electronic media? By gathering data such as the typical number of pages; the condition, size and weight of the paper; media types; and handling and retention requirements, you can assess how long the conversion will take to complete.

3. Structure and categorize. Identify the optimal index schemes based on current and future methods of retrieval, page or file-leveling indexing needs, availability of existing indexes, and the possibility of optical or intelligent character recognition (OCR and ICR).

4. Outline a plan. After determining what needs to be converted, pick the best facilities, equipment, staffing, document tracking and methods to port images into the system.

5. Conduct small-scale tests. Don’t just dive in, get your feet wet to ensure that procedures are valid and meet quality standards.

6. Train and supervise. Ensure that staff can scan and index systems.

Greg Bartels is the founder and president of Image Processing Systems (www.imageserv.com), Secaucus, NJ.