StoneFly Adds SAS Expansion to IP SANs

StoneFly, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc. (DNF), is now offering high-capacity SAS expansion for all four S-Class models in its Integrated Storage Concentrator (ISC) line of IP SANs. While StoneFly has been delivering SAS-configured IP SANs since 2006, the four S-Class models, which also support SATA, provide small and medium businesses with more options for transaction-intensive applications and tiered storage flexibility.

Now available, the new S-Class ISC systems are being offered in addition to the existing SATA-only ISC models that StoneFly has been providing for several years.

The addition of SAS to the ISCs lowers the cost of expansion significantly: from $1.00 per GB previously, to $.80 per GB currently. In addition, customers can now increase expansion to up to 72 additional disks on two of the S-Class models (the ISC-1602S and ISC-2402S) to allow even more options for storage scalability. All four SAS/SATA models support 450GB SAS disks, which are the largest capacity drives available for SAS systems. Support for SATA disks up to 1TB is also available for the S-Class ISC systems.

"With organizations demanding more and more tiered storage capacity, along with the ability to scale quickly and easily, the ISC is positioned to deliver more storage flexibility than ever before for our customers," said Bahman Jalali, director of product management for StoneFly, Inc.

The ISC product line was developed to offer a simple, rapid to deploy IP SAN in a box for growing organizations. Within a single chassis, all IP SAN functions are consolidated for virtualization, management and storage. Based on the extensible StoneFly StoneFusion operating system, the ISCs offer both flexibility and performance to deliver a full-featured IP SAN solution that can scale to meet changing needs. Available configurations range from 2 to 24TB in a single node.

Another change announced today for the ISC line is that it now comes standard with 6 Gigabit Ethernet ports, or can be upgraded to support dual 10G connections. In addition, StoneFly has announced new manufacturer suggested retail pricing (MSRP) for the ISC S-Class models. SATA configurations start at US$8,400 MSRP; SAS configuration start at US$10,100 MSRP.

New Pricing and Warranty Coverage on HSC-HA IP SANs
StoneFly also announced today new pricing for its Hybrid Storage Concentrator (HSC) line of IP SANs in high availability (HA) configurations. The new MSRP for 32TB configurations, built without a single point of failure, is US$43,000. In addition, StoneFly has increased its standard warranty coverage to include next business day parts replacement or onsite support for all HSC-HA configurations.

All StoneFly IP SANs are anchored by the StoneFly Storage Concentrator Storage Virtualization Engine, which offers quad core processing power, dedicated iSCSI cache, and the award-winning StoneFusion IP SAN platform for block-level provisioning as well as centralized storage management, and advanced storage features including replication, mirroring and snapshotting.