Assurance Storage and AIC Team

Customers of Assurance Storage LLC and AIC, Inc. will be amongst the first in the world to experience storage servers which utilize the Intel Corp.‘s Xeon E5-2600 processor family .

The new servers equipped with the latest Intel Xeon E5-2600 multi-core processors support hardware acceleration for RAID and software optimizations utilizing the new CPU instructions. These new chips deliver enhanced instruction sets which have allowed the two companies to deliver performance without the need for special purpose hardware acceleration cards. This change not only delivers  performance, but also frees up the PCIe slots for additional uses, such as additional solid state PCIe cards.

The servers are built upon the AIC SB301-TO chassis delivering up to 16 cores from a single or dual-socket Intel E5-2600 processor. Total bandwidth has been increased with the addition of a fourth channel and there is now support for DDR3 1600 MHz memory and up to 384GB. These chips now include embedded PCIe functionality, reducing latency and increasing throughput. These processors and chipsets also consume less power and generate less heat, providing additional savings to data center operators.

Assurance Storage has updated their software stack to deliver RAID support utilizing the newly available instructions in the Xeon E5 processors. The software provides a unified storage solution, together with exploiting on-board SSD and PCIe flash storage for acceleration of database and data warehouse processing, whilst also minimizing RAID rebuild interruptions and reducing support costs.

Assurance is delivering these systems to VAR partners for evaluation and customer deployment. Partners can deliver these servers to their customers with their own branding, to further the relationships with their customers.

"The Assurance Guardian servers, built upon the AIC SB301-TO chassis, provide a tremendous opportunity for independent software vendors and channel partners to benefit from the latest in storage server technology combined with flexible storage media choices and  virtualization and caching software," said Steve Visconti, president and CEO at Assurance. "With this series of appliances, partners can provide a wide range of high-performance storage options to meet the needs of their clients."

"Customers and partners will now be able to manage some of the most advanced storage systems using the latest innovations from Intel, AIC and Assurance," said Sherman Tang, VP , Server and Storage Solutions at AIC. "AIC is delighted to work with Assurance to deliver customizable high-performance, power-efficient solutions to our joint partners and customers."

"Intel worked with its’ customers, including AIC and Assurance, to optimize the new instructions and capabilities in the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor family providing intelligent technology to deliver energy efficient performance, data protection and scalability to benefit IT," said David Tuhy, GM of Intel Storage Group.