Winchester Systems Upgrades Disk Arrays to 8 Gb Fibre Channel

The FlashDisk SX-2300 is a high performance tiered RAID disk array that supports a base shelf with a single controller or dual redundant failover controllers with mirrored cache, 12 SAS or SATA disks and up to six expansion shelves. Each expansion shelf holds 12 SAS or SATA disks for a total of 84 disks. It uses SAS 15k rpm disks to 450 GB, 10k rpm disks to 400 GB or 7.2k disks to 1 TB. It also supports SATA 7.2k rpm disks to 1 TB each. Maximum capacity is 84 TB. Thus, up to 3 tiers of storage for applications with differing speed requirements can be deployed in a single SX-2300 disk array system.

The FlashDisk SX-2300 is tiered storage and is intended for both the most demanding performance driven primary storage applications including virtual servers, database, OLTP, financial, manufacturing as well as capacity driven secondary storage applications including backup, archiving, snapshots, virtual tape libraries, data acquisition, medical imaging and surveillance. It also supports popular VMware, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers.

"The FlashDisk SX-2300 Series is similar to the FlashDisk SX-3400 Series but uses 12-bay, 2U high shelves versus 16-bay, 3U high shelves used in the SX-3400," according to Mr. Joel Leider, the company's chief executive officer. "This allows smaller increment expansions yet higher total capacity of 252 TB in a single 42U high cabinet," he added.

RAID 6 offers dual parity for the utmost in data protection. Even if two disk drives fail or become unreadable, the data will remain intact. Powered by the newest generation of hardware ASICs, the dual parity RAID 6 runs at full speed for both SAS and SATA drives with little or no performance degradation. According to the company's white paper, "Enterprise RAID 6," RAID 6 dual parity offers 500 to 30,000 times longer MTDL (Mean Time to Data Loss) than RAID 5. An informative 6-minute presentation "RAID 6 Essentials" is also available.

Pricing starts at under $13,000 and delivery is 1-3 weeks ARO.

About Winchester Systems Inc.

Winchester Systems provides network-attached storage, direct-attached storage, tiered-storage, storage area network and enterprise data storage solutions for commercial, industrial, healthcare, education, government and military applications. These solutions include high performance iSCSI, SAS, SCSI, SATA and Fibre Channel RAID disk arrays; tape backup devices and other high performance commercial and military grade data storage for mid-range servers including Windows, Windows Clusters, Linux, Linux Clusters, and UNIX. For more information visit Winchester Systems on the web at www.winsys.com.