InfoStor : Intransa delivers 10Gbps IP SAN, May 2007 Page 1

By Ann Silverthorn

May 7, 2007—Intransa today introduced the StorStac Performance Controller Unit 100 (PCU100), a 10Gbps IP SAN that is targeted at applications such as video-on-demand, IPTV, digital imaging, video surveillance, data mining, and other I/O-intensive applications.

Users can independently scale performance by adding controllers, or they can increase capacity by increasing the number of disk spindles.

According to Intransa, beta versions of the 10Gbps StorStac PCU100 began testing in January 2007. The tests included multiple StorStac PCU100s and StorStac Storage Capacity Enclosures (SCEs).

Jeff Whitney, vice president of marketing at Intransa, says the company discovered during testing that applications designed to run on 1Gbps links don't always auto-swap well with 10Gbps. "At 1Gbps, the applications fill up the pipe. At 10Gbps, the applications don't fill the pipe and aren't designed to process more than one transaction at a time, so we tuned our 10Gbps product to work with any application."

Whitney adds that Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn server OS will include multi-pathing, and the upcoming version of VMware will support jumbo frames. Both are expected to hit the market later this year.

Integrated StorStac OS software provides fail-over, load balancing, volume management, snapshots, and replication. Fault tolerance is based on Intransa's n-way active-active architecture.

All major components in the PCU100 are hot-swappable, field-replaceable units and have redundant connections to the disk enclosures. The PCU100 supports multiple physical mirrors with mirror management for data availability and accessibility.

The StorStac family was announced in March 2007. StorStac storage systems can be deployed with up to four networked 10Gbps PCU100s or 2Gbps PCU20 controllers and 15 SCEs.

The PCU100 uses Neterion's 10Gbps Xframe iSCSI adapters and supports multiple SCEs that range in capacity from 3.75TB to 12TB.

An entry-level StorStac system with one PCU20 and 4TB of RAID-protected storage carries an MSRP of $44,000, while a PCU100 system with 4TB has an MSRP of $76,400. Customers can add PCUs and SCEs for more capacity and performance. For example, a PCU100 with 24TB would cost about $132,000; two PCU100s and 24TB would cost about $187,000.

The StorStac line is available through Intransa's channel partners.

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