Accusys, Inc. announced the ACS-62100 Dual-Independent RAID storage system, the first external PCI-Express to SATA hardware RAID storage system with innovative dual independent PCI-Express RAID controller technology built to enhance the overall performance and reliability. ACS-62100 will be offered in 2U 12 bays, 3U 16 bays and 4U 24 bays configurations. Of the three configurations, the 3U and 4U rack mount systems support single controller and dual independent controller infrastructures.

ACS-62100 storage system is built upon an innovative and useful architecture to provide great flexibility with unrivaled speed. The system also takes the full advantage of the high performance and low cost PCIe and SATA technology, which makes it the most affordable and cost-effective PCIe RAID storage in the market. Using the 1 terabyte SATA II hard drives, the 2U 12 bays single controller system provides 12 terabytes of storage and the 3U 16 bays/4U 24 bays dual controller system provides 16/24 terabytes of storage system. The massive storage is controlled either by a single or dual RAID controller(s) with up to 2 gigabytes of cache memory with BBM protection in each controller.

The dual independent RAID controller technology is provided to improve the security of the data stored inside the system and the performance when running throughout intensive applications. During the dual independent mode, each controller is dedicated to handle half of the total drives in a storage system. To achieve the higher level redundancy, users can choose to use an OS or software RAID utility to create mirroring of the volumes reported from two controllers. Nevertheless, users can choose to stripe the volumes from two controllers to achieve the maximum performance for tasks that requires greater IO transfer speeds, such as 2/4K HD format video playbacks.

The dual independent feature is enabled with two PCI Express re-drive boards on two PCI Express slots, or with one ACS-62000SW dual port switch card or one ACS-62000SW-09 9-port PCI Express switch box. Both ACS-62000SW and ACS-62000SW-09 will economically occupy only one PCI Express slot on the host server.

"The storage market has been growing incredibly fast and it has never stopped craving for more in terms of larger capacity and higher speed while having affordable price and creative designs at the same time," said Frank Hu, the director of product strategy of Accusys. "The ACS-62100 dual independent storage system not only can fulfill and satisfy the current users, but takes the PCI express storage market to a new era. The idea of having two RAID controllers share and work in the same system is a very powerful design in the real world practice because it can fully utilize the PCI Express bandwidth and the controller IO processor and allows users to configure top level RAID to meet their needs."