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A Successful RAID: Magnetic Storage Usurps Optical at Registry Imaging System

For nine years, the Essex County Registry of Deeds used an optical jukebox to store its document images. Then, one day, the Internet arrived and storage was never the same.

Optical storage has always been the Achilles heel of document imaging. Mechanical beasts in a digital world, optical jukeboxes are slow, expensive hardware systems that store hundreds of thousands of images used by a typical government agency imaging system. With optical, workers had to practice patience as they waited 10 to 30 seconds between the time they clicked their mouse and when the image finally appeared on the screen. Some agencies tried to get around the problem by creating software programs that would pre-fetch images overnight.

Despite the drawbacks of optical storage, few government agencies could justify using RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) -- the fastest type of high-volume storage available. RAID packages several disk drives that work together for fault tolerance and performance, with each disk having its own SCSI or fiber channel, which provides fast throughput.

FAST, CHEAP AND EASY

For years, the expense of RAID limited its use in the public sector. But like so many other hardware technologies, RAID keeps dropping in price while its speed, performance and versatility increases. Today, RAID storage costs as little as 35 cents per megabyte, and entire systems range in price from $1,000 to $600,000, with top-of-the-line systems capable of storing terabytes of data. RAID drives are not only faster but also smaller than past systems; they can transfer data at 100MB per second and can attach directly to a network.

State and local governments are starting to notice these improvements. Last January, the Essex County Registry of Deeds in Salem, Mass., purchased a Unisys PrimeStor NAS2000 RAID subsystem for storing and managing land-title documents. The 400GB of magnetic storage replaces an aging optical disc jukebox that housed 800,000 document images.

"We switched to magnetic storage because its faster and cheaper than optical," said Michael Miles, assistant registrar of deeds. "We started using a UNIX-based optical storage system back in 1990. Today, the annual cost of simply maintaining the jukebox is higher than what I spent on RAID."

WINTEL MAKEOVER

The registry's RAID is part of a $300,000 imaging system makeover, which includes Windows NT applications and file servers. By moving to a system based on Windows and Intel, Miles said the registry finally bid farewell to proprietary technology and can now take advantage of the price competition and technological advances that exist in the Wintel world.

By switching to RAID, the Essex County Registry salemdeeds.com/>, which has been recording land documents since 1639, has also boosted the capabilities of its new Web service. Not only can customers access images quickly, they can use the Internet service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. RAID's fault tolerance keeps the land records available day and night. "The service is free to anyone who wants to use it," said John O'Brien, Essex County registrar. "They can view or print the documents, which don't have any legal value unless they are certified."

According to Peter Passaretti, director of storage systems for Unisys, the registry's switch from optical storage to RAID as a means to speed Internet access to documents is a new phenomenon. "Traditionally, RAID is used in mission-critical applications to minimize computer downtime," he said. But Passaretti wouldn't be surprised to see more applications like Essex County's in the near future.

One of the reasons why RAID systems are becoming more popular is their ease of use. Passaretti said NAS2000 can be attached to a network and become operational in less than an hour. Network-attached RAID systems give workers faster access to files than if they went through a server. In Essex County, the public can access images housed in NAS2000 over the Internet via a Web server that resides on NAS2000's network. Registry staff access the storage server directly from their Windows PCs.

Other advances in RAID technology include:

* Faster drives, capable of 10,000 RPMs, improve data transfer rates;

* Smaller systems, in the 50GB storage category, have opened the door to desktop RAID; and a

* Fiber channel, which not only provides 100MB per second data transfer rates, increases the number of RAID devices that can be hooked up to a system.

Reflecting a more common view in government today, the Essex County Registry of Deeds says it switched to RAID for business reasons, not because it was a better technology. The county earns substantial revenue from the registry, which has slashed its staff from 75 to 44. RAID has provided the registry with an opportunity to further cut maintenance costs while enhancing a growing demand for business on the Internet. That's a pretty modern outlook for the country's oldest registry.

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With more than 20 years of experience covering state and local government, Tod previously was the editor of Public CIO, e.Republic’s award-winning publication for information technology executives in the public sector. He is now a senior editor for Government Technology and a columnist at Governing magazine.
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