Sans Digital With Four SATA/SAS RAID Solutions

Sans Digital is introducing two series of cost-effect RAID solutions for SATA / SAS hard drives.

AccuSTOR AS316X2HA
3U 16 Bay Rackmount SAS/SATA Hardware
RAID 5/6/50/60 Rackmount

The TowerRAID SAS series consists of 4-bay (TR4XHA/TR4X-BHA) and 8-bay (TR8XHA/TR8X-BHA) storage towers for consumer to small-business data backup. The AccuSTOR SAS series consists of 2U 12-bay (AS212X2HA) and 3U 16-bay (AS316X2HA) rackmounts for more intensive storage needs. They could be easily configured into JBOD or RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1, 3, 5, 6, 30, 50 or 60 to achieve data in various forms of redundancy suitable for assorted environments.

The introduction of RAID greatly increased the level of data storage reliability by writing extra or multiple versions of data across different hard drives. As Serial Attached SCSI technology is becoming increasingly popular, the needs for affordable SAS storage solutions with RAID capabilities have increased as well. Sans Digital is now offering a solution that lowers the overall cost of running a SAS RAID array by offloading the RAID engine calculation to a high performance PCIe RAID adapter.

The SAS RAID adapter supports up to RAID 6, which could tolerate up to two simultaneous hard drive failures, eliminating data access downtime. By utilizing a high performance SAS RAID controller card, the SAS units are able to take advantage of features such as ultra-fast 1200MHz IOP341, DDR-2 533 MHz memory and PCIe 8x interconnection link. It is backward compatible with SATA drives, allowing users to take advantage of economical SATA drives initially, and upgrading to high performance SAS drives later without the need for additional hardware. At the same time, the superior read and write speeds allow the SAS units to be practical alternatives to previous Fibre Channel connections, which are relatively more expensive on a dollar-per-Gigabyte base.

In addition to their economical price range, the performance of the SAS units also exceeds that of the subsystems where RAID is built-in. The external RAID controller combines the purpose a host bus adapter and a RAID engine, simplifying the data path from hard drives to the computer, which reduces data latency.

"The SAS performance series supports RAID monitoring, RAID notification, automatic failover, and automatic recovery," said Grandy Chen, Sans Digital President. “The rackmounts are designed with cable-less modularized hot-swappable redundant power supplies and SAS expander controller to further minimize the possibility of data access downtime."