Winchester Systems 8Gb FC Array Expands to Up to 426TB

Winchester Systems Inc. announced that their FlashDisk FC-3400 Fibre Channel Disk Array, now in its 10th generation, expands to 426 TB and supports the new 8 Gb Fibre Channel standard. This latest generation of products supports faster ASICs which combined deliver over 1,800 MB per second data throughput and 117,000 IOPS. It provides for expansion to 224 Fibre Channel and SATA disk drives and total storage of 426 TB.

The FlashDisk FC-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 FC-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 Fibre Channel disks and up to 13 expansion shelves. Each expansion shelf holds 16 Fibre Channel or SATA disks for a total of 224 disks. It uses Fibre Channel 10k and 15k rpm disks to 600 GB or 7.2k rpm SATA disks to 2 TB. Thus, up to three tiers of storage for applications with differing speed requirements can be deployed in a single FC-3400 disk array system.

"The FC-3400 supports 426 TB in 14 shelves that are each 3U high conveniently fitting into a single 42U rack thus storing nearly half a petabyte in just six square feet of floor space," according to Mr. Joel Leider, the company’s chief executive officer. "It is 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 Fibre Channel 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 $15,000 and delivery is 1-3 weeks ARO.