Winchester Announces SAS Array

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data storage solutions company, today announced a new SAS (Serial Attach SCSI) hosted SATA disk array that expands to 60 TB with 1 TB disk drives. 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.

The companys FlashDisk SX-2302S disk array provides up to 60 TB of storage using a 2U base unit that includes a single RAID controller and 12 high capacity disks. The base unit supports up to four 2U expansion shelves, each with 12 drives, for a total of 60 high capacity SATA disk drives and provides outstanding reliability and performance with very low cost per terabyte. The SX-2302S also provides two SAS 4x wide host ports for convenient multi-host connectivity. A dual redundant controller version, FlashDisk SX-2304R, offers up to three expansion shelves with a total of 64 high capacity SATA disk drives for up to 64 TB of total capacity. It also provides four SAS 4x wide host ports to provide low cost “SAN-In-A-Box” connectivity to as many as four servers without the need for expensive adapters and switches.

The FlashDisk SX-2300 Series of 2U enclosure provides very high storage density and fits 252 TB into a single 42U high rack in just six square feet of floor space. FlashDisk SX-2300 Series disk arrays 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 SATA secondary storage device delivering 1,150 MB per second sustained throughput and over 78,000 disk IO operations per second.

“The FlashDisk 2300 Series is a SAS hosted product that now offers storage professionals the ability to provide very simple, low cost and exceptionally reliable multi-host connectivity without the Fibre Channel infrastructure costs, according to Mr. Joel Leider, the company’s chief executive officer. “This is especially important for the largest imaging, security, archiving, and data acquisition installations where simplicity, reliability, storage density and low costs are key.

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, “The hardware ASIC is key to creating a RAID 6 array that has sufficient power to provide high performance.”Winchester Systems Inc.