SATA Disk Array Expands to 48 TB

Offers RAID 6 Dual Parity Data Protection

Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data storage solutions company, today announced a new Expandable SATA disk array that offers RAID 6 dual parity data protection.

The company’s FlashDisk SX-3498R disk arrays provide up to 48 TB of storage using a base unit with redundant RAID controllers and up to three disk-only expansion shelves with a total of 64 high capacity SATA disk drives to provide outstanding reliability and performance with low cost per terabyte. It also offers eight 4 Gb Fibre Channel host ports to provide “SAN-In-A-Box” connectivity to as many as eight servers without the need for external Fibre Channel switches.

The SX-3498R product is perfect for the highest capacity applications including backup, snapshot, archive, disaster recovery, virtual tape library, data acquisition, imaging, video and audio. The unit delivers impressive performance for SATA secondary storage device delivering nearly 900 MB per second sustained throughput and over 110,000 disk IO operations per second.

“Customers desire expandable SATA products to lower the cost of storage while maintaining the data integrity provided by dual redundant controllers and the vastly superior RAID 6 dual parity data protection,” stated Mr. Jerry Namery, the company’s chief technology officer. “Coupled with the highest outstanding field reliability and capacity of the Seagate 750 GB Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) disk drives, the SX-3498R delivers an outstanding overall storage value,” he added.

RAID 6 provides dual parity to protect against two drive failures and to help ensure that critical disk rebuilds, after a disk drive failure, are successful – especially important with today’s large arrays. According to the company’s white paper, “Enterprise RAID 6” (http://www.winsys.com), RAID 6 dual parity offers 500 to 30,000 times longer MTDL (Mean Time To Data Loss) than RAID 5. RAID 6 parity on FlashDisk is performed with hardware ASICs for high speed to ensure that RAID 6 runs at comparable speed to RAID 5.

“IT managers want low cost secondary storage to offer the same redundancy and reliability as their primary storage,” according to Mr. Joel Leider, the company’s chief executive officer. “The FlashDisk SX-3498R is a 9th generation design that delivers the benefits of high capacity and expandability with the best possible protection of Seagate PMR disk drives, dual redundant controllers and RAID 6 dual parity data protection,” he emphasized.

The FlashDisk SX-3498R models are available now and start at under $15,000. Delivery is 2-3 weeks ARO.

About Winchester Systems Inc.
Winchester Systems provides network-attached storage, direct-attached storage, tiered-storage and storage area network enterprise data storage solutions. 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 http://www.winsys.com.