LSI CTS2600 Family of Configurable Storage Components

LSI Corporation introduced the CTS2600 family of configurable storage components, offering white box channel partners a quick, efficient and cost-effective approach to build, customize, brand and sell a wide range of external storage system configurations. This approach using configurable components is designed to provide channel partners with the flexibility to assemble complete systems to their customers’ specifications without the need for costly stocking of pre-configured systems.

"The introduction of the CTS2600 family is a significant milestone on our mission to be the most trusted and comprehensive storage building block supplier to the channel," said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI. "The CTS2600 family complements our existing channel portfolio and provides partners with one-stop shopping for delivering both direct-attached and external storage solutions to vertical market segments such as managed hosting, cloud, medical applications and digital content."

The LSI CTS2600 family is designed for small to midsize enterprises in direct-attached and storage area network (SAN) environments and includes affordable, high-quality external storage components such as controllers, storage enclosures and disk drives. The CTS2600 family is built upon the robustness of more than 20 years of LSI system design and development expertise and over 400,000 storage systems shipped across a wide range of workloads and market segments.

The CTS2600 family allows channel partners to deliver systems with 6Gb/s SAS back-end drive connects and offers multi-protocol host connectivity, mixed drive support, simplified management and low power consumption. Multi-protocol host connectivity includes 6Gb/s SAS and 1Gb/s iSCSI or 6Gb/s SAS and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interface options. The multi-protocol host connectivity delivers support for a wide variety of implementations, from low-cost rack-integrated solutions and single-room data centers using SAS, to SAN environments utilizing iSCSI or FC for larger consolidation and virtualization projects.

"Colfax International offers a broad spectrum of high-performance computing solutions, all of them completely customizable to meet our customers’ unique requirements," said Gautam Shah, CEO, Colfax International. "The addition of configurable external storage building blocks to the LSI channel portfolio is well aligned with our business model and will enable us to deliver low-cost, high-performance storage solutions that can quickly and efficiently meet customers’ changing mission-critical demands."

Midrange performance, functionality
with entry-level affordability
LSI CTS2600 controller technology combined with leading host interface connectivity can deliver bandwidth up to 4,000 MB/s on sustained reads from disk and over 40,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) random disk reads. By offering both balanced and sustainable performance, partner-configured systems can reliably support both random and sequential access-intensive application workloads.

The CTS2600 family offers additional flexibility with drive enclosures supporting performance-optimized SAS drives, capacity-optimized SAS drives and solid-state drives (SSDs). Customers can intermix up to 96 drives in either 2.5-inch form factors using the new 2U, 24-drive CTS2600-24 enclosure or 3.5-inch form factors using the 2U, 12-drive CTS2600-12 enclosure. By offering the ability to intermix drive types within a single system, customers can more easily address a wide range of capacity and performance requirements while optimizing rack space and power and cooling costs.

The CTS2600 family’s support for 2.5-inch drives and SSDs, which deliver higher IOPS per watt and produce much less heat than mechanical 3.5-inch drives, also promotes lower overall annual energy expenditures. In addition, the CTS2600 power supplies comply with Energy Star, 80 PLUS energy efficiency and Climate Savers Computing specifications for even greater energy efficiency.

The CTS2600 family helps to ensure high reliability and availability with fully redundant hot-swappable components, automated path failover and extensive online dynamic RAID administration capabilities. Partner-configured systems also provide simplified storage management using LSI SANtricity ES management software. The SANtricity ES graphical user interface is designed to meet the needs of both full-time storage administrators who want complete control over their storage configuration as well as part-time system administrators who need an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that helps them ensure optimal storage utilization.

SANtricity ES software also offers optional, fully integrated replication features including volume snapshot, volume copy and remote volume mirror across Fibre Channel host ports, helping customers in managed hosting, cloud, medical applications, digital content and other vertical markets to meet high data availability and protection requirements.

Branding guide and training
LSI offers a branding guide to authorized system builders with information about the process of branding systems built from CTS2600 components. In addition, LSI provides comprehensive product training and support tailored to the needs of system builders as part of the LSI Authorized Systems Builder Program. The initial online training includes hardware and software configuration, maintenance and troubleshooting designed to ensure high-quality installations and a positive end-customer experience.

The CTS2600 family of configurable storage components will be available from select LSI distributors, system builders and system integrators on July 7, 2010.