InfoStor : SAS product update: Xyratex, Promise, Arena, April 2008 Page 1

By Kevin Komiega and Dave Simpson

April 3, 2008—Xyratex this week announced the OneStor SP1224s, a new member of the company's OneStor Extensible Storage Platform (ESP) family that connects to hosts via SAS and is based on Seagate's latest 2.5-inch small-form-factor (SFF) SAS disk drives.

The SP1224s is the second member of the ESP family, joining the OneStor SP1424s. The SP1424s is a 24-drive array based on 3.5-inch drives, while the new model offers the same number of drives in a 2U form factor.

The OneStor ESP family has common field replaceable units (FRUs), the company's Intelligent Platform Manager (IPM) software, and Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) 2.0 compatibility, which, according to Xyratex senior product manager, Mark Hall, enables server and storage OEMs to reduce both product ramp-up time and inventory costs for spares.

The SP1224s includes Seagate's 2.5-inch, 10,000rpm and 15,000rpm Savvio SFF drives, and supports single or dual SAS host I/O modules and three 3Gbps mini-SAS connections per host I/O module.

"The 4U SP1424s was directed at the high-capacity SATA market, while the SP1224s is a performance-optimized system that plays at the top of the enterprise market," says Hall. "And, because of the physical size differences between the drives, customers are essentially getting twice the IOPS density while consuming half of the watts."

Also this week, Promise Technology introduced two SAS/SATA RAID controllers—the SuperTrak EX8658 and EX8654. The EX8658 has eight external SAS/SATA ports, while the EX8654 has four internal and four external SAS/SATA ports. Promise also sells the SuperTrak EX8650, with eight internal SAS/SATA ports, and the EX4650, which has four internal SAS/SATA ports.

The SuperTrak EX8658 and EX8654 controllers, which come in an MD2 form factor, support RAID 5 and 6 (dual parity RAID) and can be extended via Promise's 12-bay or 16-bay E-Class JBOD expansion units.

Also on the SAS front, Arena Maxtronic has begun shipments of FC-SAS and SAS-SAS RAID systems. The 4U, 24-bay JanusRAID2 SS-8811R and rack-mount SS-8812R support 4Gbps Fibre Channel-to-SAS connectivity or 3Gbps SAS-to-SAS connectivity.

Features of the JanusRAID arrays include an IOP 348 dual-core processor, dual active-active controllers, a SAS expansion port for connecting up to 120 disk drives, support for virtually all RAID levels (and multiple RAID levels and stripe sizes per disk group), and support for Windows VDS and MPIO.

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