Infortrend recently began shipping a new addition to its Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture (ESVA) RAID family that includes 8Gbps Fibre Channel host interfaces and 6Gbps SAS drive connections.
The ESVA F60 RAID array is available in two models: the F60-2830 has eight 8Gbps Fibre Channel ports and 6Gbps SAS drive connections, and the F60-1830 has four 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports and 3Gbps SAS drive interfaces. Common features include support for 1TB or 2TB SATA drives, 8GB of cache, and eight to 16 3.5-inch drives.
In addition, the F60-2830 model can be configured with 73GB or 146GB ZeusIOPS solid-state disk (SSD) drives from STEC. The arrays include embedded software for SSD data management.
Other bundled software applications include thin provisioning, virtualization and snapshots, with free software/firmware upgrades for three years. Replication is optional.
Users can scale the 3U arrays in two dimensions by adding RAID heads for performance and JBOD enclosures for capacity. Each RAID array can be configured with up to 16 drives, and via JBOD expansion units capacity can be scaled to 112 drives. Scale-out configurations can have up to 1,344 drives.
MSRP for an eight-drive, 16TB ESVA-F60 configuration with 2TB SATA drives is $50,000, including software.
RAID with SEDs
Also on the RAID front, Arena-MaxTronic next month will begin production shipments of a RAID array that supports Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs) for data-at-rest security. The 2U TS-4801R array can be configured with up to 24 2.5-inch 3Gbps SAS drives, four 4Gbps Fibre Channel host connections, and dual active-active RAID controllers. The TS-4801R supports all RAID levels, including dual-parity RAID 6.
The company is emphasizing the power efficiency of the RAID array, claiming that the use of 2.5-inch drives consumes about 50% less power than 3.5-inch drives. Other “green” features include an energy-efficient power supply, dynamic airflow fan for thermal cooling, and a fan module that reduces energy consumption.