Igloo AXStor-FC SAN Storage Bridge Bay From Boston Limited

Boston Limited have announced a storage appliance designed to meet the demand of organisations looking for storage appliances based on hardware failover technologies. Based on the SBB 2.0 (Storage Bridge Bay) standard, the Boston AXStor-FC has been designed and optimised as a dual-redundant 4GB Fibre Channel SAN for high availability applications. The AXStor-FC provides fibre-channel connection with features that include high availability and performance whilst also maintaining a low power footprint.

Manoj Nayee, Managing Director of Boston Limited says: "Complexity seems to have increased with all the storage elements like software, firmware, interconnect and interface. Boston has made buying storage a very simple process by using the SBB standard but marrying it with a very flexible range of controllers. The AXStor-FC is the first of a full range of complete solutions that Boston are launching to market."

This dual 4Gb FC SAN with fully redundant active-active controller operation provides users with a choice of SATA and SAS drive configurations thus ensuring flexibility for capacity oriented storage as well as I/O intensive applications. The AXStor-FC provides up-to 1,200 MB/sec throughput whilst maintaining data integrity and enabling full use of the quad 4 Gbps Fibre Channel host interfaces. Whilst the AXStor-FC delivers performance it does not ignore capacity with the easy addition of JBODs to create a large storage array. The AXStor-FC features a 64-bit RISC processor with hardware RAID 5/6 and a cable-free SAS backplane design.

Monitoring and management of the AXStor-FC appliance is achieved via a storage manager software which is available as a Java application or can be accessed by a web-browser using the in-built user interface. This software provides an array of enterprise features such as variable stripe size, flexible cache control, on-line RAID expansion and logical volume management. Featuring several power-saving modes, built-in MAID technology allows the AXStor-FC to deliver green storage for environmentally aware enterprises. The controller also provides event logging and event notification via email or SNMP.