8Gb FC RAID-6 Introduced by Winchester Systems

Winchester Systems, Inc. announced the start of their 10th generation of FlashDisk RAID disk arrays. The initial product in this group is the FlashDisk SX-3400 that offers the latest 8 Gb Fibre Channel ports and a new generation of faster ASICs which combined deliver 1,800 MB per second data throughput and 117,000 IOPS. It provides for expansion to 112 SAS or SATA disk drives and total storage of 112 TB.

The FlashDisk SX-3400 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-3400 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, 16 SAS or SATA disks and up to six expansion shelves. Each expansion shelf holds 16 SAS or SATA disks for a total of 112 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 112 TB. Thus, up to 3 tiers of storage for applications with differing speed requirements can be deployed in a single SX-3400 disk array system.

"The SX-3400, with 8 Gb Fibre Channel ports, is the first introduction in our 10th generation FlashDisk high performance disk arrays," according to Mr. Jerry Namery, the company’s chief technology officer. "The SX-3400 supports 112 TB of tiered SAS and SATA storage operated by a single management console with ‘call home’ capabilities and backed by 24×7 support," 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.

Pricing starts at under $15,000 and delivery is 1-3 weeks ARO.