LSI Enhances Engenio 7900 Storage System

LSI Corporation enhanced the LSI Engenio 7900 storage system with  high-density SATA drive enclosure, solid-state drive (SSD) support and iSCSI host interface support.

Advanced storage monitoring and reporting capabilities are also available for LSI storage systems through Tek-Tools Storage Profiler. Together, these enhancements are designed to help customers optimize storage performance, reduce operational costs and more efficiently manage both physical and virtual environments.

"Cost-effective midrange storage is becoming the centerpiece of the data center, helping IT managers confront soaring data growth, escalating energy bills and flat budgets," said Phil Bullinger, executive vice president and general manager, Engenio Storage Group, LSI. "The Engenio 7900 system incorporates innovative features that help customers lower costs, improve energy efficiency and realize the full benefits of virtualization technology."

The Engenio 7900, based on the seventh-generation system architecture from LSI, is the flagship member of the LSI Engenio family of modular storage systems. The system provides scalability and adaptability features that protect overall storage investments and support large-scale virtualization and consolidation projects.

New features and enhanced capabilities include:

• The high-density Engenio DE6900 SATA drive enclosure, which is capable of housing 60 3.5-inch SATA drives in a 4U space. The enclosure’s front-loading drive drawers are designed to be easily serviceable and maintain data availability by keeping drives online while the drawer is open. The enclosure provides 2.8 times greater density compared to the current sixteen-drive enclosure, enabling a 480TB system to reside within a standard 19-inch rack. The increased density reduces power consumption by more than 30 percent and floor space by more than 65 percent.
• Support for enterprise-class STEC ZeusIOPS SSDs, which can deliver nearly 80 times the IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance of traditional drives, enabling a new tier of storage for the most demanding workloads. Using SSDs can lower power consumption by up to 80 percent and reduce the required amount of rack space while delivering equal performance on an IOPS basis.
• Support for tiered storage area networks (SAN-tiering) via multi-protocol SAN connectivity which enables the concurrent intermixing of a new dual-ported 1Gb/s iSCSI host interface card with 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host cards. Mixing Fibre Channel and iSCSI host cards allows less-demanding applications to run on servers using lower-cost iSCSI interfaces, producing as much as a 57 percent savings in infrastructure costs. Multi-protocol SAN connectivity is also available on the recently introduced Engenio 4900 storage system.
• Deeper visibility into the performance and capacity utilization of Engenio storage systems using an enhanced version of Tek-Tools Storage Profiler. Leveraging the advanced monitoring and reporting capabilities of Storage Profiler, IT managers can create a holistic view of their virtual and physical environment to identify and resolve problems in real-time and increase operational efficiency.

The LSI Engenio 7900 storage system is currently available to OEM customers.