Winchester Systems Tiered FC Flash RAID Expands Up to 215TB

Winchester Systems, Inc. announced that their FlashDisk FC-3400 Series RAID array now provides tiered storage and supports both Fibre Channel and SATA disk drives and has increased capacity from 100 TB to 215 TB.

As an enterprise class product, the FlashDisk FC-3400 is intended for the most demanding applications including virtual servers, database, OLTP, financial, manufacturing, video and real-time data acquisition. It supports popular VMware, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers.

The FlashDisk FC-3400 is a high performance Fibre Channel RAID disk array that supports a base shelf with single or dual redundant failover controllers, 16 Fibre Channel disks and up to 13 expansion shelves. Each expansion shelf holds 16 Fibre Channel or 16 SATA disks for a total of 224 disks. It uses Fibre Channel 15k rpm disks to 450 GB or 10k rpm disks to 400 GB — and SATA 7.2k rpm disks to 1 TB each. Maximum capacity with 13 Fibre Channel expansions shelves is 100 TB and with 13 SATA expansion shelves is 215 TB.

The dual redundant controller model with four 4 Gb Fibre Channel ports provides 1,500 MB per second sustained throughput and over 120,000 disk I/O operations per second with cache mirroring enabled for controller failover. For backup, archive, snapshots, virtual tape libraries and other secondary storage requirements, the FC-3400 supports a second tier of SATA disk storage for such capacity driven applications.

"Within a single RAID array and one management console, IT managers can now economically deploy virtual servers, large databases and make test, backup and archive copies in mission critical environments without compromising speed, reliability, manageability or serviceability – and at minimal cost," according to Mr. Joel Leider, the company’s chief executive officer. "All 14 of the 3U shelves fits exactly into one 42U rack in just six square feet and delivers tremendous performance at 120,000 IOPS with unprecedented RAID 6 data integrity — for a fraction of the price of popular alternatives," he added.

RAID 6 offers dual parity for the utmost in data protection for valuable enterprise data. Even if two disk drives fail or become unreadable, the data will remain intact. Powered by hardware ASICs, the dual parity RAID 6 runs at full speed with little or no performance degradation — key for enterprise applications. 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.

Pricing starts at under $25,000 and delivery is 1-3 weeks ARO.