Eurostor to Introduce 4U RAID Up to 126TB

Based upon the new 3 TB SATA hard disks manufactured by Hitachi, EUROstor GmbH qualified the first RAID systems that make use of this new capacity level in order to provide 50% more storage space than before in the same housing.

This is interesting in case of those systems which offered the highest packing factor even before, with 42 hard disks at four U, the ES-6642 series. 126 TB can be administered in one single box – and the same capacity may be added in an expansion box.

Contrary to former expansions of capacity, the change from 2 TB to 3 TB is not only a quantitative move, because SAS/SATA controllers presently in use are only able to address a maximum of 2 TB of a hard disk – thus limiting the original SCSI protocol. Only the new controller generations based upon SAS-2 (6 Gbit SAS) made it possible to enlarge the original address space.

Among others, EUROstor applies the enhanced SAS-2 technology in the new series of its ES-6600 systems, with SAS-2 or 8 Gbit Fibre Channel to the host. The latter are now delivered with 4 instead of 2 ports per controller, thus making it possible to connect four servers directly with the RAID without the additional costs of a Fibre Channel switch. Furthermore, the controllers are equipped with a more powerful processing unit in order to allow for increased performance requirements.

At this year’s CeBIT EUROstor will present new high availability NAS solutions, based, among others, on Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, ES-8700 iSCSI cluster systems as well as ES-8200 Fibre Channel + iSCSI Hybrid RAID systems which may be used in mixed SAN solutions.

"For a long time many of our customers, mainly those from the image processing sector, have been asking for larger hard disks in our RAID systems," says Franz Bochtler, Managing Director of EUROstor. "Especially here it is important to provide large storage space at low cost. With the new 3 TB hard disks the required capacity may be achieved with fewer systems thus considerably reducing the total costs."

The price for a ES-6642 RAID system, single controller with 4x 8 Gbit FC to the host, partially equipped with 8x 3 TB enterprise SATA hard disks, for example, amounts to €11,650.10 including VAT (€9,790.- without VAT).