Thecus D16000 for NAS Daisy-Chaining With 6Gb SAS Cables

Thecus Technology Corp.
announced an unit specifically for daisy-chaining and users have the
ability to increase volume with fast transfer and infrastructure cost
savings.

Thecus D16000 characteristics
Daisy-chaining technology is put in place by Thecus. At first glance, the D16000
resembles the N16000 so much that the average user likely won’t be able
to tell the difference. However, the device is a different unit,
specifically the internals. First, CPU and RAM cannot be located in the
interior as there are no CPU and RAM. What are included in the D16000
are 16-bays, backplane with SAS I/O. SAS SFF-8088 cables are
required to link devices together. In a nutshell, the D16000 can be
viewed as a large external hard drive coupled to each other for massive
volume, hence DAS for (direct-attached storage).

Daisy chain basics
The announcement of implementing daisy chain technology is a milestone
and brings wonderful functions. Network topology is for network
administrators to link two or more devices together to transfer data.
Daisy chain layout is beneficial to users who often require adding more
nodes to the network. In addition, this layout is an easy way to connect
nodes together and requires little cable to do so.

Daisy chain in action
To expand volume with daisy chain, one master N16000 unit is required to
guide the daisy-chaining, and then users are able to link up to four
D16000 as target units. SAS cables are utilized to link the units
together to get rapid speeds. With this set-up, users are able to obtain
massive amount of volume, up to 320TB of storage space. The ability to
reach this capacity at a low cost is something new to the industry.

Cost savings with the D16000
It’s about half the cost for the same storage capacity. What this means
is that the D16000 will list for about half the amount of the N16000
unit or even less, which is a bargain that technology grants with
daisy-chaining. Users will get the privilege to utilizes more volume,
less cost with daisy chain.

To conclude
The concept of daisy-chaining NAS together is geared towards enterprise
level users, with this said: large enterprises that require a vast
amount of rackmounts can take advantage of daisy-chain and connect
D16000 units for massive volume expansion, with  cost savings. To add,
since SAS SFF-8088 is utilized to transfer data, users can rest assure
that transfer speeds is unmatched.

During Computex 2012 in Taipei, the D16000 and daisy-chain setup was put on display.