Product spotlight: Fose 2008

By GCN Staff

Connecting state and local government leaders

| April 2, 2008

Slim-line removable Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks gives new meaning to the phrase 'handheld RAID.'

At the FOSE Conference and Exposition in Washington today, CRU-DataPort gave new meaning to the phrase 'handheld RAID' when it displayed its slim-line removable Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). The drive can be inserted into an available bay on a computer (such as the now-defunct but ever-present 3.5-inch floppy drive bay), and provides not just a single removable disk drive but a mirrored pair for redundancy.Previously, removable drives were typically used in secure government environments, allowing administrators to remove a computer's hard drive and lock the sensitive data in a sensitive compartmented information facility. Today the drives are finding wider adoption in more commercial applications such as providing storage for surveillance video in police cars or for providing a means to quickly update on-demand movie libraries at hotels.Wiebetech displayed its Drive eRazer today at FOSE. This pocket-sized device quickly connects to a computer's hard drive and 'zaps it of all data' according to James Wiebe. The device has many practical uses: from erasing hard drives from computers before they are disposed of, to emergency situations where data must be purged quickly to avoid it being compromised. The simple and inexpensive device erases the disk drive back to where it must be initialized and reformatted if it is to be used again. Wiebetech recently was acquired by CRU-DataPort.You've heard of TCP/IP; but have you heard of MTP/IP, the Multipurpose Transaction Protocol? If you want to move large files across wide-area networks, you might want to take a look at Data Expedition's ExpeDat here at FOSE.ExpeDat, a client/server application, uses MTP/IP ' a protocol built from the ground up ' to expedite the delivery of large files over congested networks. MTP/IP piggybacks on the UDP Internet protocol known for its data-blasting capabilities.The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has reported an increase in IPv6 allocations made to the federal government in 2007.ARIN, one of five Regional Internet Registries chartered by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority to manage and distribute Internet address space, reported a record 109 IPv6 allocations in 2007, more than double the amount they made in 2006. Many of the allocations were made to federal agencies in accordance with the Office of Management and Budget June 2008 mandate for IPv6 compliance.ARIN said that some agencies go directly to ARIN for address allocations, while others, depending on the structure of the agency, go through a parent bureau or department for allocations. ARIN said it interprets the increase in allocations as a sign that IPv6 is gaining support and adoption in the United States and by the federal government.FOSE is run by the 1105 Government Information Group, which also owns Government Computer News.

Slim-line removable Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks gives new meaning to the phrase 'handheld RAID.'

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