Globalstor Debuts FibreStor
Portable 4Gb FC system for professional A/V applications with 5 SATA HDDs
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on April 13, 2010 at 3:05 pmGlobalstor Data Corporation, an OEM integrator of RAID, SAN and storage/video servers, announced the launch of a new storage offering, FibreStor, during this year’s NAB show in Las Vegas.
A portable five-drive tower with a single 4GB host connection, FibreStor is ideal for high-throughput professional audio applications, video editing, transporting data between facilities and other activities requiring a small, portable Fibre Channel storage solution.
FibreStor is a convenient, powerful storage option for today’s audio and video professionals, who often have to juggle several different projects at a time with limited storage space. Comprising five Enterprise Class SATA drives disk drives or optional Solid State Drives and a single 4Gbps Fibre Channel host interface, this desktop array offers a capacity of up to 10TB storage with more than 20 hours of uncompressed 10-bit HD video footage. As such, FibreStor can support real-time HD and SD applications, including single 10-bit 1080i HD, making for a very cost-effective near-line storage library.
“Globalstor has always been at the forefront of developing solutions that make storage as efficient and easy as possible for the end user, and FibreStor is the latest example of this,” says Globalstor President Scott Leif. “This portable Fibre Channel system offers the same great benefits of larger storage solutions, including the ability to process HD and SD video files and a high storage capacity, so it’s perfect for on-set and other types of applications that require fast access to storage in a small footprint.”
Globalstor has built FibreStor for maximum performance, with a processing rate of 400 MBps, fast RAID 5 striping technology and an efficient, sustained performance that reduces the disk array count from four to three. It performs exactly the same in redundant mode as non-redundant mode, so even if a drive were to fail, performance wouldn’t be impacted.
As with all Globalstor products, FibreStor has several levels of built-in redundancy, including a fail-safe RAID 5 disk array, which can be connected directly to Fibre Channel host bus adapters or switch equipment, SATA drive HotSwap even when I/Os are active, an LED drive mismatch warning when drives are removed and re-installed incorrectly and RAIDWatch, which runs continually and silently in the background without impacting performance. In the case of a system crash, an auto background drive can rebuild the storage topography in real-time, even while users are working on a project.
FibreStor has been designed for ‘plug-and-play’ installation, with a rotary switch for easy configuration of RAID level options, and supports all operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Mac. The Fibre Channel interface includes 4Gb optical/copper cable interface support, multimode optics (850nM), auto-speed of 1, 2 and 4 Gbps, data transfer rates of full duplex 800MBps at 4Gb and end-to-end data integrity (T10 DIF support).