iXsystems Collaborates With HighPoint

Thanks to the developers at Highpoint Technologies Inc., FreeBSD developers at iXsystems, Inc. recently committed HighPoint's RocketRAID 2700 series drivers into FreeBSD.

This means increased hardware support and more options for FreeBSD users and vendors.

HighPoint designs and manufactures a spectrum of SAS and SATA HBA's for storage solutions. It has developed RAID drivers to meet industry's evolving storage requirements. Their RocketRAID 2700 SAS 6Gb/s series, a host RAID HBA line, provides connectivity with up to 32 ports. The RocketRAID 2700 series is for a workstation, desktop, or server environment that requires performance storage with reliability, and supports operating systems including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.

The RocketRAID 2700 SAS 6Gb/s HBA card series is a BSD-licensed, freely available driver that can now be distributed and installed with the FreeBSD installation disk. This eliminates the hassle of customizing a kernel, and running into potential incompatibility issues when updating the FreeBSD system.

The driver also provides users with configuration tools for specific applications, real-time monitoring, and notification systems. It is supported on mainstream x86 platforms, and will be kept up to date by FreeBSD community developers to ensure its compatibility with future FreeBSD releases. The RocketRAID 2700 SAS 6Gb/s series driver will be available in all future releases of FreeBSD, beginning with versions 8.3 and 9.1.

"We would like to thank HighPoint for their contribution," says Xin Li, FreeBSD Developer and Senior Software Engineer at iXsystems. "The new driver will enable users to install and use FreeBSD on the new SAS 6Gb/s HBAs. This gives users more choices when designing FreeBSD-based storage solutions as a result of cutting edge hardware support."