Areca: ARC-8088 Cable External 12Gb SAS Redundant RAID Controller

Areca Technology Corporation announced the availability and shipping of ARC-8088, a 24-bay cable solution external 12Gb SAS RAID controller.

It offers a fault-tolerant links across separate host interface, enabling customer to build a redundant shared storage and application failover with existing enclosure.

The ARC-8088 models come with host connectivity choices of 16Gb FC, 12Gb SAS and 10Gb/s iSCSI. The different host interface boards make ARC-8088 RAID subsystem suited for professionals who need capacity and performance with various connectivity solutions. It incorporates onboard high performance 1.2GHz dual core RAID-on-Chip storage processor and on-board 2GB DDR3-1866 ECC SDRAM to deliver hardware RAID performance. The ARC-8088 RAID controller module attaches to SATA/SAS backplanes with cables from 6xmini SAS HD SFF-8643 connectors on the controller module.

The ARC-8088 includes one 12Gb SAS expander that incorporates LSI DataBolt bandwidth optimizer technology to buffer 6Gb/s data and then transfer it out to the host at 12Gb/s speeds in order to match the bandwidth between faster hosts and slower SAS or SATA devices. The optional flash-based backup module (FBM) provides power to the cache if it contains data not yet written to the drives when power is lost. It8 also supports Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery backup module (BBM) to protect cached data on RAID controller.

The ARC-8088 firmware and EPLD has implemented the SES-2 protocol and disk activity map to SGPIO based indicator LEDs. In addition to meet different enclosure, ARC-8088 RAID controller has implemented autonomous chassis management of two power supplies status connectors, four fan monitor/speed control connectors through the SES-2 protocol. Firmware and configuration data including vendor identification strings can be customized or tuned for individual OEM/ODM customer.