Sans Digital AccuSTOR AS316X2 3U Rackmount SAS

Sans Digital, provider of storage subsystems, has added 3U 16-bay rackmount AS316X2 to the existing AccuSTOR JBOD storage series.

       AccuSTOR AS316X2

The original 2U 12-bay AccuSTOR AS212X2 SAS to SAS/SATA rackmount is well received in the market due to its high compatibility with a variety of RAID controllers. The AS316X2 not only features the same characteristics, along with user friendly enclosure monitoring, it also provides additional storage capacity for storage hungry environments.

Intended to provide high performance at an affordable price, the AS316X2 provides 1200MB/s in bandwidth for high performance, high capacity, and fault-tolerance storage benefits. Adding a hardware RAID controller card allows delicate XOR processor for RAID calculation, offloading the intensive processing power required to perform RAID calculation from the computer systems. Performance of the AS316X2 could reach over 700MB/s with RAID controller cards when utilizing SATA hard drives, achieving enterprise-level Fibre Channel performance at a fraction of the cost.

Unlike most SAS JBOD rackmounts that do not support centralized monitoring, the AS212X2 and AS316X2 supports SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) which allows centralized monitoring of power and cooling fan status. Once the selectable switch is set for the designated RAID controller card, information regarding the status of power supply, cooling fan and hard drives is transmitted via the controller card for centralize management, without the need for additional monitoring software or hardware cables.

Compatible RAID controllers include:

• Intel SAS RAID,
• LSI MegaRAID,
• Dell PERC external SAS RAID,
• Areca 1680X or 1680iX series,
• ATTO ExpressSAS,
• Adaptec SAS RAID, and
• 3ware SAS controllers.

In addition to its enterprise-level performance and straightforward administrative management, the AS316X2 could be expanded by connecting up to 4 enclosures in a daisy-chain format, for a total of 64 hard drives, allowing expansion without purchasing additional hardware. The unit is designed with cable-less modularized hot-swappable redundant power supplies and SAS expander controller to minimize points of failures.

"Adding a RAID controller turns a performance ready JBOD unit into an all-inclusive storage solution with redundancy features," said Grandy Chen, Sans Digital President. "This helps companies cut back the overall expenses in building an enterprise-level storage infrastructure."