Our compilation of defect statistics has produced the following figures.  They are the average failure rates of SATA HDD in Compucon machines within the first 3 years of use over a 24 months data collection period ending in the month shown below.

o March 2009 3.4%
o March 2008 4.1%
o March 2007 3.9%

The figures indicate that HDD failure fluctuates between 3.4% and 4.1% over the period of 4 years covered.  This situation compares favourably with a report published by Google in 2007.  Google based on a much larger sample size than Compucon, and suggested a failure rate of about 6% in the first year of HDD operation, 8% in the second year and 8.5% in the third year.  Carnegie Mellon University has also reported on HDD failure rate analysis in 2007.  The report gave 3% as the average failure rate per year, and up to 13% for some sites.  In summary, HDD has the highest failure rate of all computer components and back up is absolutely necessary.

Market Update
1. SSD replacing or supplementing HDD?
2. Intel producing Socket H in addition to T, J and B
3. AMD keeping socket AM2/3 and winning customer loyalty

Compucon Roadmap
1. Nehalem Workstation (DXA) & Server 1U (DXT)
2. Industrial PC Product Plan

Presentation: 2009-0520 System Platform Update.pdf (1.2MB)

This session can be considered as a tuition lesson and research report.  On the tuition aspect, the purpose is to help our channel members obtain a better understanding of how a storage server works at the software level as well as hardware.  On the research aspect, the purpose is to evaluate what features we can expect from an Open Source NAS software package called FreeNAS and from Microsoft Windows Storage Server series.  Where will these efforts lead us to?  We aim to support the Compucon channel with iSCSI based NAS and SAN and virtualised storage.  The research in this area is still on-going and this session is meant to be a break point for collating the strengths of the channel.

Presentation: 2009-0520 CPD FreeNAS.pdf (240KB)

ShadowProtect utilises sector based disk imaging to deliver disk to disk back-up and recovery for both system and data protection. Supporting bare-metal recovery, even to different hardware, ShadowProtect can restore a system to its last known good working state in less than 20 minutes. The installed edition allows back-ups to be taken as often as every 15 minutes whereas the IT Edition allows a system to be backed up while operational without installing any software to that machine. The IT Edition is designed for use by a technician on any server or workstation.  In addition to explanations, StorageCraft will do a live demonstration of how ShadowProtect restore a system back on-line after a system failure in minutes rather than hours or days. 

Presentation: 2009-0520 ShadowProtect Presentation Dean.pdf (1MB)