Intransa Enhances StorStac IP Storage Line

High-end enterprise systems maker adds new capacity enclosures that can offer RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 support and can scale with modular additions.

Enterprise storage vendor Intransa April 23 introduced three new enclosures for its industrial-strength StorStac systems -- each of which can now utilize RAID 5 in its configuration, if necessary.

Intransas new StorStac SCE3 offers 3.75TB of raw capacity per enclosure, the SCE7 contains 7. TB, and the SCE11 is capable of 11.25TB. Each unit now supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10.

RAID storage management software enables the immediate availability of data and, depending on the level of control, recovery of lost data. It also provides redundancy of data at a chosen level.

"Our three new SCEs add RAID 5, so we can now offer [RAID] 0, 1, 5, and 10 in each configuration bundle," Vice President of Marketing Jeff Whitney told eWEEK. "RAID 5 (with 1 parity disk per enclosure) is important for smaller customer installations that dont want to use RAID 10 (full mirroring)."

Architected to scale from 3.75 to 1,000TB of RAID-protected, IP network-based storage in a single system, each StorStac System is composed of one or more Performance Controller Units (PCUs) for connectivity to application servers, plus one or more SCEs (Storage Capacity Enclosures) delivering SATA-II storage, a company spokesperson said.

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The SCE3, SCE7 and SCE11 join the 4TB SCE4, 8TB SCE8 and 12TB SCE12 in the Intransa StorStac System product line. All products are integrated with the Intransa PCU (Performance Controller Unit) 20.

One PCU20 can aggregate dual inbound 1 Gigabit Ethernet connections into a single, high-performance 2GbE pipe. Up to four PCU20s are supported in a single StorStac configuration, delivering 880 megabyte/seconds throughput. All StorStac Systems can be centrally managed using Intransas StorControl software with both GUI and CLI interfaces included.

Video surveillance, medical imaging, IPTV are key markets

Customers worldwide use Intransa for a variety of application needs, including data warehousing, secondary storage, consolidation, video surveillance, medical and digital imaging, IPTV (IP television), video entertainment post production and VOD (video-on-demand), Whitney said.

"Because we can scale for capacity and spindle count [by adding back-end storage enclosures] independently from scaling for performance and high availability [by adding front-end controllers], we are quite different from most of the monolithic storage vendors, or the iSCSI bricks like LeftHand and EqualLogic, where when you need one factor, you must also add the other," Whitney said.

Intransa StorStac systems are not sold directly by the San Jose, Calif.-based company; instead, they are sold exclusively through StorPartner Channel Program members, systems integrators and resellers around the world, Whitney said

"Since we are sold by value added resellers and systems integrators, typically, we arent sold as an Intransa solution, but as a complete solution for storage consolidation, Microsoft Exchange/SQL/VMware consolidation, disk-to-disk backup and recovery solutions, and data warehousing as FC SAN replacements," Whitney said.

"The same is true for our fastest-growth markets, which are our surveillance, medical imaging and video on demand markets (which also includes IPTV and digital entertainment, post production). A big partner for us in medical imaging is eRAD, as the platform for their PACS system; or H3C (Huawei-3Com), in China, for both VoD/IPTV and video surveillance," Whitney said.

All Intransa StorStac Systems deliver scalable performance and capacity in a pay-as-you-grow model, Whitney told eWEEK.

Whitney also said that the company expects to announce its 10GB offering around May 7, but he added that its availability could change by launch time.

Pricing and availability

StorPartners set their own sell price to their customers. "For example, a PCU20 StorStac System with 24TB of RAID protected SATA II storage would have a starting price of around $100,000, and the StorPartner again might offer that for 10 to 25 percent off list," Whitney said.

"A 2x PCU20 with 24TB would have a starting price of around $125,000 for either 2x 12TB SCE12 or 3x 8TB SCE8s," Whitney said. "An individual PCU20 would be priced about $23,000."

For more information, go here.

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