Winchester Systems NAS With Up to 128TB of Flash Memory

Winchester Systems Inc. announced that their FlashNAS now supports capacities to 128 TB. The unit provides large scale storage, exceptional Intel Carrier Class and NEBS-3 certified high performance appliances powered by Xeon quad-core processors to 667 MHz and up to 24 GB memory and runs Windows Storage Server 2003 R2.

The FlashNAS is available in a 1U server that supports 64 TB or a 2U server that supports 128 TB. The 1U server offers 4 GbE ports native and one PCIe slot that supports 4 GbE ports, 2 SAS 4x Wide ports or 2 Fibre Channel 4 Gb ports for storage expansion. FlashNAS supports storage with iSCSI, SAS and Fibre Channel interfaces which can be used to create tiered storage in any combination to the 128 TB limit. All storage is available to any server on the network and up to 1024 logical volumes can be partitioned and allocated to any of the servers on each FlashDisk array. All popular disk drives including 10k rpm and 15k rpm SAS and Fibre Channel drives to 450 GB as well as 7.2K rpm SATA drives to 1 TB are all supported. FlashDisk also supports the new Seagate 1 TB SAS disk drive which delivers SAS performance and reliability at SATA prices – perfect for a NAS environment – and for stretching the storage dollar.

FlashNAS supports snapshots with Volume Shadow Services (VSS) and saves storage with file-level de-duplication using Single Instance Storage (SIS). FlashNAS with Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 is optimized for file serving and delivers 20% higher performance than a standard Windows server. The storage management GUI is intuitive and easy to use.

“Storage demands continue to expand and SANs are expensive. Now many IT managers can deploy a large scale, high performance, highly reliable NAS instead of a SAN to provide storage to many servers on their network,” explained Mr. Joel Leider, the company’s chief executive officer. “FlashNAS costs substantially less than many traditional high end NAS servers – yet delivers exceptional performance, reliability and functionality.  Finding a way to do more with less is key in today’s economic situation where capital budgets are limited – and FlashNAS can help,” he added.

FlashNAS features RAID 6 dual parity for the utmost in data protection for valuable data. Even if two disk drives fail or become unreadable, the data will remain intact. This RAID 6 protection is invaluable for protecting irreplaceable or irreproducible photos and video – particularly for field use where hardware is vulnerable. 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.

FlashNAS appliance pricing starts at under $9,000 plus storage.  Delivery is 1-3 weeks ARO.