Winchester Systems Inc. announced a new disk array featuring Small Form Factor (SFF) 2.5" disk drives. Their FlashDisk SX-1300 Series is intended for high performance enterprise applications including database, manufacturing, financial and transaction processing that need higher performance than 3.5" Fibre Channel disks can deliver.

The SX-1300 support four tiers of storage on one set of RAID controllers: Tier 1+ near solid state disk performance for database hot files; Tier 1 for high speed primary storage; Tier 2 for enterprise applications; Tier 3 for high capacity backup and archives.

The FlashDisk SX-1300 base unit offers single or dual redundant controllers and twelve high performance, low power, 2.5" disk drives in an extremely compact and low power 1U high enclosure. The SX-1300 is a SAS/SATA storage solution that is expandable and can support up to four expansion shelves that are 1U, 2U or 3U high. The 1U expansion shelf holds 12 SAS 2.5" disk drives that are available in 10K rpm with 73 GB and 146 GB capacities and in 15K rpm disk drives in 36 GB and 73 GB capacities. The 2U and 3U expansion shelves hold 12 and 16 SAS drives or SATA 3.5" disk drives, respectively.

Demanding Tier 1+ applications such as database 'hot files' that are typically candidates for solid-state disk run on the 15K rpm 2.5" disks while standard high performance Tier 1 applications including large database and OLTP applications run on the 15k rpm 3.5" disks. Most other typical enterprise Tier 2 applications including e-mail and desktop applications run on the less expensive 10K rpm disks while backup, archiving and other Tier 3 high capacity applications run on low cost SATA 7,200 rpm disks.

FlashDisk SX-1300 Series expands to 67.5 TB of primary and secondary storage in a single solution that are available for both SAS and Fibre Channel hosts. FlashDisk SX-1304R, with dual redundant controllers with auto-failover and auto-failback for reliability and uptime, provides four SAS 4x wide host ports. The SX-1394R model offers four 4 Gb Fibre Channel ports. Single controller systems are also available and the SX-1302S offer two SAS 4x wide ports and the SX-1392S offers two 4 Gb Fibre Channel ports.

The FlashDisk SX-1300 Series provides high performance and up to 42 of the 1U shelves fit into a 42U high rack in just six square feet of floor space. Each shelf offers up to 1,539 MB per second sustained throughput and 143,000 disk I/O operations per second. A full cabinet configured in a massively parallel arrangement with 42 shelves, each with redundant controllers delivers a staggering 64 GB per second sustained throughput and over 6 million disk I/O operations per second. This is perfect for high performance computing (HPC) and the largest random access applications including search engines, social networking sites, video distribution, photo sites, remote backup services and highly parallel web services.

Additionally, the FlashDisk SX-1300 disk arrays with 2.5" disks is designed to consume up to 65% less power than typical 3.5" enterprise class RAID arrays. IT managers can choose to save substantially on power and cooling creating a more "green" data center and to overcome electricity supply constraints that are prevalent certain major metropolitan areas.

According to the company's chief executive officer, Mr. Joel Leider, "The SX-1300 family of products is simply breathtaking in its versatility as it offers industry leading performance, reliability, capacity and green initiatives all in one highly configurable product at competitive prices."

The company's chief technology officer, Mr. Jerry Namery, explained: "The 2.5" disk drive will be as revolutionary to the IT environment as was the 3.5" drive and the 5.25" drive of prior generations. It improves performance and storage density, lowers power and cooling requirements while offering flexible tiered storage all in one simple storage architecture that is available now."

For added protection of today's very large RAID disk arrays, the company includes high-speed, ASIC-driven RAID 6 dual-parity that protects data in the event of two drive failures as well as rebuild failures. 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.

Available now, the FlashDisk SX-1302S and SX-1394S models using 73 GB disks start under $10,000. Delivery is 2-3 weeks ARO.