SGI Entering Into 6Gb SAS External RAID

Silicon Graphics International Corp. announced the SGI InfiniteStorage 5000, a RAID storage system that combines hardware with a choice of host interfaces and drive technologies in an external storage platform. This system provides features and configuration flexibility to accommodate a selection of data store requirements with compelling mid-range performance at entry-level affordability. SGI InfiniteStorage 5000 is SGI’s first storage system to employ 6Gb/s SAS technology.

SGI InfiniteStorage 5000 provides customers with improved performance and scalability, multi-protocol host connectivity, flexible drive support, data security features and advanced energy savings. With SGI’s DMF software, SGI InfiniteStorage 5000 is an ideal primary or secondary storage solution for tiered virtualization implementations. It is also ideal as a front-end for active archive architectures using an SGI COPAN MAID solution on the back-end. It perfectly complements SGI Altix UV server and Rackable rackmount server environments.

“As data volumes in the enterprise continue to grow, increased performance, reduced power consumption and system flexibility are of primary concern to customers,” said Rick Chapek, SGI senior vice president of hardware engineering. “By utilizing 6Gb/s SAS technology, SGI InfiniteStorage 5000 brings performance, reliability and a strong feature set normally seen in high-end Fibre Channel systems to an aggressive entry-level price point.”

SGI InfiniteStorage 5000 delivers bandwidth up to 4,000 MB/s on sustained reads from disk, a 4X performance improvement compared to the previous generation product. The system delivers 40,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) random disk reads, a more than 2X improvement over the prior generation.

“Although 6Gb/s SAS for drives has already become common in the industry, completing that transition by including the host side has finally begun in earnest,” said Benjamin S. Woo, program vice president, worldwide storage systems research at IDC. “With both 6Gb/s host and drive-side architecture, InfiniteStorage 5000 should provide an affordable entry-point system that offers improved storage performance and scalability, and greatly decreased power consumption. Furthermore, it is ideally-suited for mixed workloads and virtualization, making it a top choice for storage upgrades.”

SGI InfiniteStorage offers the ability to intermix drive types, allowing organizations to 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 as well as cost-effective nearline SAS drives for less performance-sensitive, high-capacity applications. SGI InfiniteStorage 5000 consumes less energy with power supplies that meet the forthcoming Energy Star, 80 PLUS energy efficiency and Climate Savers Computing specifications.

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 rackmounted server and storage DAS implementations using SAS, to iSCSI and FC SAN environments for larger consolidation and virtualization projects.

SGI InfiniteStorage 5000 is available immediately.