Entry-Level LSI 6Gb SAS-to-SAS RAID for SMBs
To be OEMed by Dell, IBM and SGI, but maybe not by Oracle
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on May 13, 2010 at 2:59 pmLSI Corporation introduced the LSI Engenio 2600 storage system, an entry-level external storage system based on 6Gb/s SAS technology. The system provides midrange performance and advanced functionality designed to allow small and medium businesses and enterprise remote and branch offices to adapt to escalating data volumes and performance requirements without sacrificing simplicity or affordability.
Racks for 12 3.5-inch HDDs
and 24 2.5-inch HDDs
"The industry has already shifted to 6Gb/s SAS on the drive side and is beginning to move toward solid deployment of related 6Gb/s SAS storage infrastructures," said John Monroe, research vice president, Storage Markets at Gartner. "Systems configured with 6Gb/s SAS on both the drive and the host side should outperform 4Gb/s Fibre Channel alternatives, cost considerably less and consume less power – compelling reasons to make such systems primary choices for upgrading storage infrastructures."
The 2600 system is the newest member of the Engenio line of modular storage systems, and the first to feature 6Gb/s SAS technology. The next-generation storage system builds on the robustness of more than 400,000 storage systems based on LSI Engenio technology that have been deployed across a broad range of environments and industries. The system provides customers with improved performance and scalability, multi-protocol host connectivity, flexible drive support, and advanced energy saving and data security features.
"Customers demand storage solutions that boost performance and improve storage utilization and efficiency," said Phil Bullinger, executive vice president and general manager, Engenio Storage Group, LSI. "By combining dynamic flexibility with the increased performance and reliability offered by 6Gb/s SAS technology, the Engenio 2600 delivers comparable functionality to Fibre Channel systems while maintaining the lower price point that entry and midrange customers expect."
The Engenio 2600 system combines LSI controller technology with host interface connectivity to deliver bandwidth up to 4,000 MB/s on sustained reads from disk, a 4X improvement in throughput performance compared to the previous generation product. The system also delivers over 40,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) random disk reads, more than a 2X improvement compared to the prior generation.
The system’s balanced and sustainable performance allows it to support a wide range of workloads by being equally adept both at delivering throughput to bandwidth-intensive applications, such as data warehousing and rich media, and delivering IOPS to transaction-oriented applications, such as OLTP and Web servers.
The 2600 system also doubles the capacity of its predecessor by offering pay-as-you-grow scalability up to 96 drives in either 2.5-inch form factors using the new DE5600 2U, 24 drive enclosure or 3.5-inch form factors using the DE1600 2U, 12 drive enclosure.
Mixed host interface and drive support
The Engenio 2600 offers multi-protocol host connectivity, allowing users to take advantage of concurrent direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area network (SAN) implementations. The 2600 system’s four native 6Gb/s SAS host interfaces can be intermixed with eight 1Gb/s iSCSI or eight 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) host ports per dual controller. This flexible and multi-purpose dual protocol approach allows organizations to implement a variety of configurations – from rack-mounted server and storage DAS implementations using SAS, to iSCSI and FC SAN environments for larger consolidation and virtualization projects.
The 2600 also offers the ability to intermix drive types to allow organizations to cost-effectively address a wide range of capacity and performance requirements. Customers can deploy high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) or SAS drives for the most demanding application workloads and cost-effective nearline SAS drives for less performance-sensitive, high-capacity applications. Self-encrypting drives are also supported to secure an organization’s most sensitive data. The system’s flexible drive support and modular scalability help to keep initial costs low while enabling tiered storage for optimized performance and reliability, reduced rack space, lower power and cooling costs and enhanced data security.
Improved energy efficiency and data security
The 2600 system delivers new energy-saving features without impacting performance, scalability or functionality. The system’s support for 2.5-inch drives and SSDs, in addition to power supplies that are designed to meet the forthcoming Energy Star, 80 PLUS energy efficiency and Climate Savers Computing specifications, can result in lower overall annual energy expenditures while still meeting performance requirements.
Utilizing 2.5-inch SAS drives, which are supported by the DE5600 enclosure, the 2600 can deliver up to a 3X improvement in IOPS per watt in power consumption and up to a 134 percent improvement in IOPS performance per U compared to a 3.5-inch drive enclosure.
Advanced data security is provided with support for SEDs utilizing LSI SafeStore Encryption Services, which helps to secure a drive’s data from unauthorized access or modification resulting from theft, loss or repurposing. Fully integrated into LSI SANtricity ES management software, SafeStore services provide local key management for self-encrypting drives for comprehensive data at rest security throughout the drive’s lifecycle with minimal cost and complexity, and without sacrificing storage system performance.
The LSI Engenio 2600 is available to OEM customers.
Comments
This LSI Engenio 2600 is replacing the model 1000 with 3Gb SAS scalable up to 48 SAS/SATA 3.5-inch HDDs. The new one is entirely based on 6Gb SAS, a specialty of the company that decided to stop to integrate any FC devices. It can accommodate up to 96 SAS drives with extension units and increasing the performance by up to 4X, or up to 4,000MB/s and 40,000 IO/s in sustained drive reads, according to the company. The idea here is to offer to SMBs a fast disk array under $10,000 (without drives and options).
"The products are more powerful than low-end CLARiiONs and less expansive," said Thierry Paprocki, LSI director of Southern EMEA, Engenio storage group.
There are two basic 2U enclosures, the DE1600 containing twelve 2TB 3.5-inch 7,200rpm disk drives for high capacity (or 600GB 15,000rpm units) and the DE5600 filled with twenty-four 2.5-inch HDDs (300GB, 10,000rpm or 15,000rpm, with FDE) or SSDs (150GB or 300GB) for intensive applications and better energy efficiency. All the HDDs supported come from Seagate and SSDs from Stec. RAID levels available are 0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10.
With two 6Gb SAS native host interfaces, the 2600 can also support in option two additional 6Gb SAS, four 1GbE iSCSI, or four 8Gb FC host ports. These figures can be doubled with dual controller. 10GbE is supposed to be added at the end of the year.
Controller Technology
LSI has added up to 2GB of mirrored data cache with battery backup and destage to flash upon power loss per dual controller.
The integrated SANtricity software offers partitioning (128), snapshots (8/volume), Volume Copy (to create a clone of a volume), data replication using an FC port, and storage reporting. SafeStore encryption services provide security for data-at-rest.
On this 2600, the main feature missing is the possibility to use it as a NAS, but LSI is working on it for a technology controlled by ONStor, a company acquired last year for $25 million and involved in NAS gateways and systems. There is also no more possibility to integrate lower cost high-capacity SATA HDDs.
As usual, these storage subsystems will be exclusively sold to LSI's traditional OEMs that will announced the same products in the next days: IBM (DS3500) that buys them without HDDs, Dell (3200?) that will manufacture the controllers using LSI's design, and SGI that takes them fully integrated. Oracle/Sun is also an OEM of LSI's mid-range disk arrays but didn't take any decision up to now to handle the new 2600.
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