4U 24-Bay iSCSI Dual Controller RAID by Sans Digital

Sans Digital is introducing a set of 4-channel single controller (upgradable) and 8-channel redundant controller iSCSI 4U 24-bay solutions.

The AccuRAID AR424I and AR424IR offers up to 900MB/s or 200K IOPS read and write performances for high workload computers, data centers, and virtualization environments such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix. Both AR424I and AR424IR utilize cable-less backplanes to provide a perfect fit between their components to ensure good signal paths and resistance to signal degradation or interference. The modularized design with redundant power supplies and cooling fans also helps to minimize system downtime.

AR424I’s design allows customers to start with a single controller offering Quad GbE iSCSI ports and upgrade to active-active redundant controller at a later time. The AR424I and AR424IR support both SAS and SATA hard drives and are capable of expanding their capacity by adding up to 3 more JBOD expansion units (AS424XI: 4U 24-Bay SAS), offering up to a total of 192TB raw capacity in a single setup.

AccuRAID AR424I and AR424IR provide hardware RAID protection against potential hard drives failures. Each controller provides four channels of Gigabit Ethernet (802.3ad) with LACP support, offering aggregated bandwidth to provide throughput performance. Both models also include the Snapshot feature without the need for additional software. Windows Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS), Windows MPIO and SCSI-3 Persistent Target for clustering OS applications are also supported. Both the AR424I and AR424IR offer a peace of mind due to their constructions and redundancy features (dual controllers, power supplies, and cooling fans).

iSCSI SAN devices are fast, reliable and economical in comparison to Fibre Channel SAN products that require more expensive Fibre Channel switches and HBAs. Utilizing the Ethernet topology, mid-size businesses or enterprises benefit more from IP SAN (Storage Area Network) that offers high speed block-level data transfer and flexible data storage integration without the need to pay a premium.

The AR424I series could also be used in the case of VMware virtualization for its centralized or clustering setup. The units are priced at $8,495 for single-controller model and $12,995 for redundant-controller model.

"The brand new 24-bay AccuRAID’s provide more features, as well as more storage capacity, to fulfill the increasing demand for such products in the current storage market," said Stanley Chan, Director of Business Development of Sans Digital. "These new storage giants provide customers the performance benefits and versatility of iSCSI RAID, plus the flexibility to upgrade to full-scale redundancy when needed."