LSI this week began shipping into the channel the entry-level Engenio 2600 RAID array, which features 6Gbps SAS connections on both the host and drive side.

Versions of the 2600 are expected to be resold by LSI’s large OEM partners, such as Dell and IBM (and, possibly, Oracle), and resellers such as SGI.

In addition to four 6Gbps SAS host connections in a dual-controller configuration, OEMs/integrators/VARs can configure the Engenio 2600 with eight 1Gbps iSCSI or eight 8Gbps Fibre Channel host ports per dual-controller configuration.

The company claims performance of up to 4,000MBps of throughput (sustained reads from disk) and up to 40,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) on random disk reads. Users can scale the array up to 96 drives via LSI’s 2U DE5600 (24 2.5-nch drives) or 2U DE1600 (12 3.5-inch drives) enclosures.

In addition to 6Gbps SAS drives, the Engenio 2600 RAID array can be configured with solid-state disk (SSD) drives, reportedly from STEC. The array can also be configured with self-encrypting drives (SEDs) and LSI’s SafeStore Encryption Services. SATA drives are not supported.

Additional software includes SANtricity, partitioning, snapshots, volume copy and data replication.

The Engenio 2600 arrays are shipping to LSI’s OEM partners now, with shipments to distributors and other channel partners expected in the second half of the year.

Separately, LSI announced four pieces of software for its MegaRAID line of 6Gbps SAS/SATA RAID controllers this week, targeted at its channel partners.

The MegaRAID CacheCade software accelerates disk array performance by enabling SSDs to be configured as a cache tier. The software is designed specifically for read-intensive applications. CacheCade is bundled with LSI’s FastPath SSD acceleration software in a $270 kit. The company claims performance of more than 150,000 IOPS in a RAID-0 configuration with MegaRAID controllers. FastPath is priced at $165 separately.

The other two software additions address data protection. MegaRAID Recovery software ($150) enables file- and volume-level data recovery via snapshots, and enables users to recover to any point in time.

MegaRAID SafeStore software ($90) is designed to be used with SEDs, and secures a drive’s data from unauthorized access or modification.

The software is available today for LSI’s MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i, 9260-8i and 9280-4i4e controllers, and will be available for all MegaRAID controllers in the second half of the year.

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