Storage Digest: News from Dot Hill, Isilon, Engenio, Silicon Graphics, OnStor, StoneFly, Verari

Dot Hill, a Carlsbad, Calif., storage vendor, has introduced a SCSI-based product that provides better performance, improved data integrity and application performance, and backwards compatibility with the previous SCSI-160 standard.

Aimed at the OEM marketplace, the SANnet II U320 supports data rates of up to 320M bps. It uses packetization maximization and quick arbitration select to help reduce overhead and CPU requirements of existing applications.

The SANnet II U320 allows faster transitions between data transfers and faster performance due to flow control optimization and read-and-write data streaming.

Get more information here.

Isilon Systems, a clustered storage vendor based in Seattle, Wash., has introduced a performance acceleration product capable of delivering 6GB per second of total aggregate throughput from a single file system.

Resource Library:

The Isilon IQ Accelerator, powered by Isilons OneFS distributed file system software and industry-standard hardware, results in a 1U form factor appliance that requires half the rack space and one-third of the power supply of traditional storage systems. Combined with Isilons OneFS distributed file system, the Isilon IQ Accelerator can turbo-charge data storage performance on the fly in 15 seconds with no manual provisioning or downtime, according to the company.

The Isilon IQ Accelerator will be available in Q1 2006.

Get more information here.

Engenio Information Technologies Inc., a Milpitas, Calif., subsidiary of LSI Logic Corp., has introduced a new controller and storage system that integrates native InfiniBand connectivity with the Engenio XBB architecture, Fibre Channel or SATA (Serial ATA) disk drives and storage management software solutions.

The Engenio 6498 controller modules offer dual-active, intelligent RAID controllers and four 10 FB/sec InfiniBand host connections while supporting up to 224 Fibre Channel or SATA disk drives. The entire Engenio 6498 storage system, controlled by SANtricity Storage Manager Software, is intended for environments that use InfiniBand-based Linux server clusters for high-bandwidth programs and complex application processing, according to the company.

Get more information here.

Silicon Graphics Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., has introduced a native InfiniBand interconnect solution that includes both servers and storage integrated into an InfiniBand fabric.

The TP9700 InfiniteStorage disk array, based on Engenios 6498 storage system, provides four 10GB/sec InfiniBand host connections that can be plugged directly into the InfiniBand fabric. Combined with a new native InfiniBand interface, the TP9700 InfiniteStorage disk array results in a scalable InfiniBand fabric that can move data at up to five times the speed of traditional Fibre Channel, said John Howarth, director of storage marketing at SGI.

The product starts at $103,550.

Get more information here.

OnStor Inc. of Los Gatos, Calif., has introduced another member of its Bobcat family of NAS (network-attached storage) gateways designed to increase performance of streaming media, content delivery and large-scale file storage applications.

The Bobcat 2280, which combines a scalable NAS gateway platform with a file data streaming engine, uses 64-bit network processors and occupies 1U of rack height. It offers 40 percent greater performance than previous versions of the Bobcat due to the new FastPath streaming performance accelerator chip that allows for 300MB/sec sustained reads and 265MB/sec sustained writes.

Get more information here.

StoneFly Networks Inc. of San Diego, Calif., has introduced the StoneFly OptiSAN, an IP SAN (storage area network) solution for high-bandwidth applications like SQL databases, transaction-oriented financial systems and streaming video.

The OptiSAN offers storage consolidation, block-level provisioning, centralized storage management, and control and monitoring of logical storage volumes. In addition, it includes StoneFly Reflection for local and campus synchronous mirroring and snapshot capabilities for accelerating data recovery. High-reliability features include advanced sub-array support with true RAID data protection built into 14 SATA II high-speed disk drives and dual Fibre Channel connectors on each RADI controller for failover clustering.

Pricing for the basic version, in a one-array configuration with 3.5TB of capacity and 14 250GB drives, starts at $21,995.

Get more information here.

Verari Systems, a blade server vendor based in San Diego, Calif., has announced a native InfiniBand attached storage system.

The VS7000i, based on controller technology from Engenio, offers storage controllers and four 10GB InfiniBand interfaces. The VS7000i is designed for high-performance cluster computing environments that use global namespace file systems to perform data-intensive research.

Get more information here.