home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
/ OS/2 Shareware BBS: 16 Announce / 16-Announce.zip / acmirror.pre < prev    next >
Text File  |  1996-04-13  |  10KB  |  73 lines
  1. {PRESS REL:} ARCO LOW COST IDE ADAPTER PLACES OS/2 MIRRORING                                                                        
  2. ON EVERY DESKTOP                                                                                                                    
  3.                                                                                                                                     
  4. March 19, 1996                                                                                                                      
  5.                                                                                                                                     
  6. Hollywood, Fl., ARCO Computer Products, Inc. today introduces the                                                                   
  7. AC-Mirror, an IDE adapter designed to provide hardware disk mirroring                                                               
  8. for OS/2. This cost effective adapter will bring RAID 1 fault tolerance                                                             
  9. to every desktop by over coming the existing hurdles of mirroring cards,                                                            
  10. overkill and overprice.                                                                                                             
  11.                                                                                                                                     
  12. PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS                                                                                                              
  13.                                                                                                                                     
  14. The AC-Mirror is a standard ISA IDE disk adapter supporting up to 4 IDE                                                             
  15. drives. The board sets up to show a standard drive while in the                                                                     
  16. background, the ARCO adapter is writing duplicate information to                                                                    
  17. the mirror drive(s). As the AC-Mirror is hardware based, no software                                                                
  18. drivers are necessary. This reduces the memory overhead and potential                                                               
  19. conflict when drivers from multiple vendors are installed. ARCO provides                                                            
  20. a simple installation program allowing users to select the primary and                                                              
  21. mirror drive, select the drive from which all reads are performed                                                                   
  22. or switch the drive being read from at intervals ranging from                                                                       
  23. 1 to 15,000.                                                                                                                        
  24.                                                                                                                                     
  25. DISASTER AND RECOVERY                                                                                                               
  26.                                                                                                                                     
  27. An alarm resides on the adapter to notify users when a drive is                                                                     
  28. compromised by a failure, a bad cable or if a cable is not attached                                                                 
  29. properly. A boot time message will appear until the drive is replaced                                                               
  30. and/or re-mirrored.                                                                                                                 
  31.                                                                                                                                     
  32. The easy to use ARCO ACP software which is shipped with the AC-Mirror                                                               
  33. allows for re-mirroring data at the touch of a button.                                                                              
  34.                                                                                                                                     
  35. IDE HANDLES HIGH PRICE AND STANDARD CAPACITY                                                                                        
  36.                                                                                                                                     
  37. RAID 1 mirroring has been available through software methods for many                                                               
  38. years. Users have been educated as to why data should be protected,                                                                 
  39. some the hard way through disk crashes. Until now, this technique has                                                               
  40. been implemented typically in a high end or server environments via the                                                             
  41. SCSI interface. SCSI has the nature of being more expensive than IDE, as                                                            
  42. well as the typical drive weighing in at 1 gigabyte or more, far greater                                                            
  43. than the average desktop drive. When calculating the price of 2 drives                                                              
  44. and 1 controller, this can up the price to retail price of $195, though                                                             
  45. it sell for less on the street. The typical disk drive can be found for                                                             
  46. $200 or less. Users will be able to mirror a gigabyte of data for                                                                   
  47. under $500.                                                                                                                         
  48.                                                                                                                                     
  49. IS IT A BACKUP?                                                                                                                     
  50.                                                                                                                                     
  51. The AC-Mirror protects users from data loss due to disk drive failures.                                                             
  52. This is critical to small off and home office companies which run an                                                                
  53. entire business from a personal computer. Many times, these companies                                                               
  54. are too busy running the day to day operation to consistently                                                                       
  55. implement an effective  backup strategy. Their businesses could suffer                                                              
  56. dramatically should their data suffer a calamity. The AC-Mirror                                                                     
  57. performs real time backup. Given the percentage of users which                                                                      
  58. backup consistently (a very low number), or need to be on-line                                                                      
  59. continuously, the AC-Mirror is ideal for data protection.                                                                           
  60.                                                                                                                                     
  61. CORPORATE INFORMATION                                                                                                               
  62.                                                                                                                                     
  63. ARCO Computer Products, Inc. was founded in 1987 and is a manufacturer                                                              
  64. of high performance IDE, EIDE and ATAPI adapters for the VL, PCI,                                                                   
  65. Micro Channel and ISA bus architectures. ARCO is located at 2750                                                                    
  66. North 29th Ave., Hollywood, Fl. 33020                                                                                               
  67.                                                                                                                                     
  68.  Contact:    Mike Hertz arco@arcoide.com                                                                                            
  69.  (305) 925-2688 - voice (305) 925-2889 - fax                                                                                        
  70.  800-458-1666                                                                                                                       
  71.  http://www.arcoide.com/adapters                                                                                                    
  72.                                                                                                                                     
  73.