Winchester Systems Disk Arrays Expand to 224TB

Winchester Systems, Inc. announced their new FlashDisk SX-3400 and FlashDisk SX-2300 SATA disk arrays. The SX-3400 expands to 224 TB using 3U high shelves and the SX-2300 expands to 168 TB using 2U high shelves. As disk arrays increase in size, so do the chances of a rebuild failure. The company features RAID 6 dual parity to protect data during rebuilds.

               FlashDisk SX-3400

The company’s FlashDisk SX-3412S model provides up to 224 TB of storage using a base unit that includes a single RAID controller and 16 high capacity disks with two 8 Gb high speed Fibre Channel host ports. The base unit supports up to six expansion shelves, each with 16 drives, for a total of 112 high capacity SATA disk drives and provides outstanding reliability and performance with a remarkably low cost per terabyte. The FlashDisk SX-3414R model is a dual redundant controller system that provides four 8 Gb Fibre Channel host ports to provide ‘SAN-In-A-Box’ connectivity to as many as four servers without the need for a Fibre Channel switch and also expands to 224 TB. The FlashDisk SX-2312S with 12 drives per shelf expands to 168 TB and offers two 8 Gb Fibre Channel ports. The SX-2314R offers the same capacity with dual redundant controllers and four 8 Gb Fibre Channel ports.

The FlashDisk SX-3400 and SX-2300 products are perfect for the highest capacity applications including deep archives, security video, medical imaging, backup, snapshot, disaster recovery, virtual tape library, data acquisition, digital imaging and audio. The unit delivers impressive performance for a SATA secondary storage device delivering 1,893 MB per second sustained throughput and over 117,000 disk IO operations per second.

"The 2 TB disk drives down the cost of storage dramatically to well under $1 per GB, making the largest video, medical and commercial and government archives financially viable," according to Mr. Joel Leider, the company’s chief executive officer. He also noted: "The 2 TB disk drive means that 502 TB, or over half of 1 PB, of FlashDisk storage fits safely and reliably into a 42U high cabinet."

The company’s chief technology officer, Mr. Jerry Namery explained: "Winchester Systems proudly features a unique high speed RAID 6, powered by a dedicated hardware ASIC, to provide high-performance 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." He added: "We recently increased the performance of the ASIC to match the capacity of the new 2 TB disk drives to minimize rebuild times."

The FlashDisk SX-3400 models using 2 TB disks are available now and start at under $20,000. Delivery is 2-3 weeks ARO.