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article:- SATA Raids the Datacenter
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Squeak! - Which RAID Manufacturers will Survive?
article:- 10 Ten Tips for a Successful RAID Implementation
article:- Using Solid State Disks to Boost Legacy RAID Performance
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New Markets for RAID Controller OEMs?

Editor:- May 8, 2008 - traditionally what stirs up a hornet's nest in the RAID controller HBA market is the introduction of new interfaces.

I've chronicled the emergence of RAID controllers using incrementally faster versions of parallel SCSI, then fibre-channel (from the 100Mbps days), SATA and SAS for the past 16 years. These technology changes always provide a window of opportunity to oems who want to be #1 in the new standard.

In the next few years a new market will open up for RAID controller HBAs aimed at the SSD market.

An ideal RAID adapter for an SSD needs different characteristics than a hard disk array.
  • better latency - the access time in the RAID becomes a critical competitive factor for the overall SSD array performence.
  • smaller RAM cache (and different sorting algorithms).
I predict that the SSD RAID adapter market will become as important a new market segment as the appearance of a new interface standard like SAS was - in the past decade.


Pillar's Petabyte Arrays are 99.999% Available

San Jose, Calif. - April 7, 2008 - Pillar Data Systems today announced availability of the Pillar Axiom 500MC - a mission critical storage system .

The Pillar Axiom 500MC delivers up to 192GB of cache, with the ability to scale capacity to 1.6 petabytes. The system supports both fibre channel and SATA disk drives. Pillar guarantees 99.999% availability. ...Pillar profile, storage reliability


Atrato SAID "50TB can fit in a 3U RAID"

Denver, Colo. - March 25, 2008 - Atrato, Inc. today announced the companys first product, the Velocity1000, a 3U RAID storage system with upto 50TB capacity.

Central to the system is its SAID Self-maintaining Array of Identical Disks which provides a hardened and secure form factor. ...Atrato profile


Enhance Technology Claims Lower Cost 2U iSCSI Storage

Santa Fe Springs, CA - March 19, 2008 - Enhance Technology today announced the R6 IP series, a 2U 6-disk RAID 5 rackmount with dual GbE iSCSI ports and up to 100MB/s throughput.

Flexible RAID slicing allows administrators to partition RAID sets into smaller segments allowing storage to be distributed on up to 16 servers, and adding more hard drives is a simple task with no downtime required.

Aaron Eskridge, Enhance's Director of Channel Sales said "With prices starting at just $2,695 (1TB model), we're offering an incredible storage solution at just a fraction of the cost of Sun, HP, Dell or EMC." ...Enhance Technology profile


New AMCC Firmware Upgrades SAS RAID Performance

SUNNYVALE, Calif - March 3, 2008 - AMCC today announced a major firmware upgrade for its 3ware 9690SA SAS RAID controller line.

The new 9.5.0.1 code gives up to a 40% performance increase and broadens 3rd party SAS expander compatibility. ...AMCC profile


IBM Chooses LSI RAID

MILPITAS, Calif - February 20, 2008 - LSI Corp today announced that its MegaRAID technology was selected for integration into IBM's System x server line.

The ServeRAID-MR10M SAS/SATA controller is a high performance x8 PCI Express RAID Controller for external DAS storage. This RAID adapter utilizes the LSI SAS1078 ROC and provides investment protection by supporting SAS and SATA hard drive configurations and providing performance enhancements enabled by a standard battery. The battery provides cached data protection during unexpected power outages for ServeRAID-10M when operating in its higher performance, write back mode.

The ServeRAID-MR10k SAS/SATA adapter enables full ROMB for LSI 1078-based subsystems on high performance servers, including the IBM System x3950 M2 and x3850 M2 servers. The System x3950 M2 is ready for virtualization right out of the box by eliminating software setup and installation time and enables four times the amount of memory to be hosted on a single chassis compared to the previous system for more virtualization workloads.

The ROMB solution is ideal for space-limited server environments. The adapters offer external connectivity with the ability to cascade up to 10 EXP3000s per port. It also features removable Battery Backed Cache and a RAID activation key along with RAID 6 Protection. ...LSI profile, RAID controllers

Editor's comments:-
the MegaRAID brand has been around for a long time. LSI acquired it along with 200 RAID employees from AMI in September 2001 the week before 9/11.


Sans Digital Introduces 3.5" InstaRAID

Santa Fe Springs, CA - February 15, 2008 - Sans Digital today introduced the InstaRAID IR12TB - a a 3.5" SATA hard drive module which houses 2 internal 2.5" drives with RAID support.

The IR12TB has a built-in hardware RAID engine to support RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (stripping) allowing data redundancy or performance increase, while only occupying the space of a single 3.5 hard drive. ...Sans Digital profile, Storage Boxes

Editor's comments:-
the idea is not entirely new. A few years ago Adtron used to market the I35MB Diskpak which included 2x PATA mirrored disks.


ONStor Reports 3rd Year of 100% Growth

CAMPBELL, Calif February 6, 2008 - ONStor Inc. today announced that the company ended its 3rd consecutive year of 100% revenue growth.

Designed with n-way clustering, file server virtualisation, and a single pool of open storage, ONStor says its clustered NAS products deliver simple, efficient NAS storage management solutions which are also energy efficient. ...ONStor profile


StorageMaster Offers Real-time Content Delivery

ATLANTA, GA - January 24, 2008 - Concurrent Computer announced today the launch of its new StorageMaster product line.

The StorageMaster regional file server allows service providers to centrally house and rapidly transport specific content (faster than real-time) to remote locations, even down to the node level.

Concurrents on-demand platforms must store and stream thousands of hours of video content for hundreds of thousands of end-users, but, in the end, you are still dealing with digital data, explains Bob Chism, Concurrents CTO. We will launch StorageMaster within the cable community first; we know those customers well and have the sales infrastructure in place to specifically target them. Our plan is to next adapt the content storage product to provide versatile, scalable, high-density storage products for that portion of the IT market handling critical data, with a need for resiliency and fast storage and retrieval. ...Concurrent profile


QNAP Includes Enterprise RAID Features in Entry Level 4 Bay

Taipei, Taiwan - January 21, 2008 - QNAP Systems, Inc. today unveiled its 4-bay TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS for business users.

The TS-409 is a hot-swappable HDD design with RAID 0/ 1/ 5/ 6/ 5+spare disk redundancy and remote replication functions.

According to QNAP's VP Shawn Shu, "The hot swap design and the advanced RAID are the dominant features of TS-409 Pro that are rarely provided by other entry-level NAS suppliers. The RAID 5 and RAID 6 support, Online RAID Level Migration and Capacity Expansion features are an important breakthrough in NAS for business and SOHO users." ...QNAP Systems profile


EMC Re-enters the SSD Market with SSD Arrays

Editor:- January 14, 2008 - after a 20 year gap EMC re-entered the SSD market with the launch of its Symmetrix DMX-4 networked storage systems populated with flash SSDs from STEC.

You may not realise that EMC was an SSD pioneer 20 years ago (in 1987). EMC's SSDs were 20x faster than the then available hard disks. But market forces and losses led to EMC exiting the "memory enhancement" business soon after.

Will today's launch be any more successful? I think so. The server market has always been hungry for more performance.

Back in 1987 - when EMC's original SSD came to market - the performance issue was clouded by a spate of new RISC processor announcements (such as SPARC, MIPS, and PA) - which gave 3x CPU speedups compared to CISC offerings from Intel, Motorola and DEC's VAX while using conventional hard disk storage.

Today there are over 62 SSD oems and I predict within a few years there will be hundreds of rackmount SSD array vendors joining the EMC bandwaggon.

This part of the SSD revolution is not about replacing hard disks. It never was. It's about getting more application performance from less servers by using storage accelerators.


ATTO Ships New FastStream RAID

Macworld Expo, San Francisco, CA - January 14, 2008 - ATTO Technology, Inc. today announced the general availability of its new line of FastStream storage controller appliances.

These deliver up to 1,200 Megabytes per second access to data with parity RAID protection and are suited for applications in DVA and IT infrastructures including 4K and 2K digital film production, high-definition video post-production, digital prepress, disk-to-disk backup, audio production and transaction-based environments. The FastStream SC 7500 uses a 4Gbps Fibre Channel interface for the host connection and a SAS interface for drive connectivity. The FastStream SC 7700 uses Fibre Channel for both the host and drive connections. ...ATTO profile


Mad Media Replaces Sneakernet with Sonnet RAID

IRVINE, Calif - January 10, 2008 - Sonnet Technologies desktop Fusion D800RAID has been adopted by design and post-production house Mad Media.

It provides Mad Media with reliable storage of its unique high definition video not only for use in Web content, but also for national television ad campaigns, feature-length film projects, and new mobile technology platforms like the iPhone. The dual GbE Fusion D800RAID system replaced the companys sneakernet storage scheme that was comprised of a series of 1TB external drives from various manufacturers.

I have very closely monitored the progression of low-cost data solutions for professional video applications for the past few years, and Sonnets Fusion D800RAID product was the first to offer RAID 5 redundancy with a storage capacity of more than 6TB and throughput exceeding 500 MB/sec, said Joshua Martelli, director of TV/film at Mad Media. ...Weve been thrilled with the result. The Fusion system gives us a central repository from which our editors can access the same data simultaneously, and its allowed us to organize footage more effectively, safeguarding content from future loss while increasing our productivity. ...Sonnet Technologies profile


Dot Hill Extends RAID Supply Agreement with HP

CARLSBAD, Calif - January 7, 2008 - Dot Hill Systems Corp. today announced that it has expanded its RAID supply agreement with HP from 1 to 5 years.

The agreements covers RAID storage arrays for the HP StorageWorks 9000 Virtual Library System. Dot Hill believes that the extended agreement has the potential to increase revenue in 2008 and also announced that it expects to report revenue results for the quarter ended December 31, 2007 to be above the guidance issued in November. ...Dot Hill profile, ...HP profile


Advanced Media Demos SSD RAID at CES

Las Vegas. NV - January 4, 2008 - Advanced Media, Inc. announced today that during CES it will be demonstrating its 2.5" SATA flash SSD in a RAID configuration that offers 260MB/s Read and 130MB/s Sequential Write speed.

"Ridata SSD now supports multiple drives on a system's main board with an on-board RAID controller" remarked Harvey Liu, Advanced Media President. "It increases storage capacity, but will also jump start performance by multiple times as well!" ...Advanced Media profile


Samsung Launches RAID Class Hard Drive

SEOUL, South Korea - January 3, 2008 - Samsung announced today its new F1 RAID Class 3.5 SATA hard drive featuring 1TB of capacity.

Offering the worlds highest recording density using only 3 platters and running at 7,200 RPM, the F1R drive is designed for demanding applications such as database, email servers and web servers.

The Spinpoint F1R specs an MTBF of 1.2 million hours and offers enterprise class features such as command completion time limit, and vibration tolerance. It features a 16 or 32MB cache, a SATA interface, 175MB/s maximum media transfer rate, and NCQ.

Samsung claims the F1R is the coolest operating 1TB hard drive in its class with an average of 6.7 watts in idle mode and an average of 7.2 watts in random seek mode. It will ship this quarter. ...Samsung profile


EasyCo Shows Power of Managed Flash Technology in RAID-5

Wallingford PA - December 2, 2007 - EasyCo LLC (a North American distributor for Mtron Flash SSDs) has just completed detailed performance testing on Mtron drives, both as single drives and in RAID-5 arrays.

These tests provide concrete performance numbers for using Mtron drive in performance critical applications such as database and transaction servers, as well as in more widely used products such as laptops.

Of special interest will be confirmation that Flash SSDs operate differently in RAID-5 arrays. Hard drives running RAID-5 normally perform significantly slower than those configured RAID-10. With Flash, RAID-5 and RAID-10 perform virtually identically.

At large block sizes, the Mtron drive is 10-40% faster than a 15K RPM hard drive, mostly depending on what part of the HDD you are accessing. When coupled with the MFT management layer, the Mtron drives are basically 50x faster than a 15K HDD regardless of the read/write mix. ...read the article (pdf), ...EasyCo profile, ...Mtron profile


AMCC Reduces Price of Fast Desktop RAID

SUNNYVALE, Calif - November 12, 2007 - AMCC today announced a $400 price reduction for its 3ware Sidecar.

Education customers may also take advantage of an additional $100 reduction when they buy directly from AMCC. The 4 bay desktop system delivers speeds up to 4x faster than eSATA and up to 28x faster then USB solutions.

"The 3ware Sidecar generated a lot of excitement this year and enjoyed consistently outstanding reviews, largely because of its unique ability to provide our customers very high performance RAID protection in a convenient, easy-to-use desktop box," said Scott Cleland, Director of Marketing for AMCC Storage. "We're offering these reductions to make enterprise-class RAID protection accessible to a wider audience which now includes students and home enthusiasts, many of whom have not considered using full-featured true hardware RAID because of the expense." ...AMCC profile


Infortrend's New 12 bay 1U RAID

FRANKFURT, Germany, October 29, 2007 – Today at SNW Europe, Infortrend unveiled its first 2.5" hard disk based RAID subsystems.

The 1U rackmount, 12 bay models are available with either SAS-to-SAS or 4G-FC-to-SAS interfaces. ...Infortrend profile, RAID systems


Addonics Launches PCI Flash SSD RAID Adapter

SAN JOSE, CA - October 23, 2007 - Addonics Technologies today announced a PCI flash RAID adapter.

The Addonics AD4CFPRJ enables users to create a low cost large capacity SSD. It fits into any PCI slot and allows as many as 4 Compact Flash media of any capacity to be used like an ordinary hard drive. The adapter includes built-in firmware, which allows the CF cards to be configured as one large volume, 4 individual drives, or configured for redundancy with support for RAID 0 (Striped), RAID 1 (Mirrored), and RAID 10 (Mirrored Striped).

With the increased capacity and lowering costs of flash media, replacing the hard drive with CF as a boot drive is now a viable alternative because CF offers lower power consumption and no moving parts.

The adapter supports UDMA, DMA, and PIO hard drive modes. OS support includes DOS, Windows 98/ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, and Linux kernel 2.4+ . The Addonics Quad CF PCI adapter has a MSRP of $49.95 ...Addonics profile

Editor's comments:-
The risk with this approach is that many CF cards aren't designed for intensive write operations and don't have internal wear levelling controllers. That's what differentiates a flash SSD from vanilla flash storage. If a user is tempted (by the low price) to install the Addonics adapter in a server application - with the wrong type of flash cards - the storage media may fail in under a year.


Open-E integrates Adaptec's Remote RAID Service

Puchheim, Germany - October 18, 2007 - Open-E announced today it has integrated Adaptec's Remote Access Service for RAID in its Open-E OS.

The solutions developed in collaboration by both companies are intended to deliver an "All-around-No-Worry-Package" for iSCSI SANs. Customers benefit from easy RAID management functions that can be done remotely instead of locally at the storage server. Open-E delivers its storage software preconfigured on a USB flash module. ...Adaptec profile, ...Open-E profile


Aristos Logic Samples Multi Interface RAID Chip

Foothill Ranch, California - October 15, 2007 - Aristos Logic announced today availability of the AL3450 UltraSlice-MPx - 3rd generation RAID storage processor chip.

The AL3450 integrates the multi-processor RSP engine, 3Gb/s SAS and 4Gb/s Fibre Channel host and disk interfaces and a PCI-X interface on a single chip. Developed in response to some of the fastest growing segments of the market such as blade servers, the AL3450 features enterprise class performance and reliability while delivering low power consumption in a small footprint. It is available immediately in sample quantities to Aristos Logic's OEM partners. ...Aristos Logic profile, storage chips, RAID controllers


Panasas Solution Targets RAID Unreliability

FREMONT, CA - October 9, 2007 - Panasas, Inc. announced the Panasas Tiered Parity Architecture which the company claims is the most significant extension to disk array data reliability since Panasas CTO Garth Gibson's pioneering RAID research at UC-Berkeley in 1988.

With the release of the ActiveScale 3.2 operating environment, Panasas will offer an innovative end-to-end Tiered-Parity architecture that addresses the primary causes of storage reliability problems and provides the industry's first end-to-end data integrity checking capability.

Traditional RAID implementations protect against disk failures by calculating and storing parity data along with the original data.

In the past 10 years, individual disk drives have become approximately 10x more reliable and over 250x denser than those protected by the first generation RAID designs in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, the number of disk media failures expected during each read over the surface of a disk grows proportionately with the massive increase in density and has now become the most common failure mode for RAID. A RAID disk failure can cause loss of all the data in a volume which may be tens of terabytes or more. Recovery of the lost data from tape (assuming that is all backed up) can take days or even weeks.

Other storage system vendors recognize this same issue and apply RAID 6, often called double parity RAID, to address this problem. Double parity schemes only treat the symptom of the failure, not the cause, and they carry substantial cost and performance penalties, which will only get worse as disk drive densities continue to increase.

Panasas Tiered Parity architecture directly addresses the root cause of the problem, not the symptom. Solving the storage reliability problem caused by these new 1TB and larger disks allows Panasas to build larger and more reliable storage that allows users to get more value from their data and are less expensive for IT to support.

"The challenges with storage system reliability today have little to do with overall disk reliability, which is what RAID was designed to address in 1988. The issues that we see today are directly related to disk density and require new approaches. Most secondary disk failures today are the result of media errors, which have become 250x more likely to occur during a RAID failed-disk rebuild over the last 10 years," said Garth Gibson, CTO of Panasas. "Tiered Parity allows us to tackle media errors with an architecture that can counter the effects of increasing disk density. It also solves data path reliability challenges beyond those addressed by traditional RAID and extends parity checking out to the client or server node. Tiered Parity provides the only end-to-end data integrity checking capability in the industry." ...Panasas profile

Editor's comments:-
the problem of data corruption in large data sets because of obsolete technology assumptions built into hard disks, interface and RAID products has been looming for several years. You can see articles and research about this on the storage reliability page.

Is the solution more reliable hard drives? better interfaces? or a smarter storage OS? Users can't wait another 5 years for ideal solutions because the symptoms are there today when you look. The Panasas solution sounds like a pragmatic tactical approach for some customers - but the industry is a long way from a better storage reliability mousetrap.


AMCC Ships New 3ware SAS RAID Controllers

SUNNYVALE, Calif - October 1, 2007 - AMCC today announced the immediate availability of the 3ware 9690SA Serial Attached SCSI RAID controller.

The 3ware 9690SA offers configuration flexibility with 3 PCI Express low profile controller choices: 8 internal ports, 8 external ports, and 4 internal/4 external ports. AMCC now offers a highly scalable 3ware serial storage product portfolio that includes 2- to 24-ports of SATA connectivity and maximized SAS expandability to up to 128 devices per controller. The SAS controllers include AMCC's unified RAID management interface and software suite, assuring users a simplified configuration experience with every 3ware controller, irrespective of its storage interface.

"AMCC is excited to add Serial Attached SCSI RAID controllers to our award-winning line up of 3ware serial storage products," said Scott Cleland, Director of Marketing for AMCC Storage. "We pioneered the way for SATA and we now capitalize on our time-proven serial storage expertise to take users from SCSI to SAS. The 9690SA offers customers superior hardware RAID performance and reliability. Most importantly, whether our customers require SAS, SATA or SAS/SATA connectivity, 3ware will provide the right tool for the job."

Suggested list price for the 9690SA-8I (8 internal ports) is $895; the 9690SA-8E (8 external ports) is $945; and the 9690SA-4I4E (4 internal and 4 external ports) is $925. ...AMCC profile


Dynamic Network Factory Ships SASmaster RAID Systems

Hayward, Calif - September 11, 2007 - Dynamic Network Factory, Inc. today introduced the SASmaster family of scalable SAS-to-SAS and SATA-to-SAS RAID arrays.

DNF has also announced that it has added 1TB SATA drive support to its Enterprise F12-HA RAID subsystems and at the same time expanded its overall Enterprise RAID product line with additional SAS-to-Fibre Channel arrays.

Now available, the new SASmaster product line features 3 models including the SASmaster 12sz, the SASmaster 16sz and the SASmaster 16sz-HA (high availability). The SASmaster 12sz supports 12 hot-swappable drives, while the other 2 models support 16 hot-swappable drives each. In addition, each model supports up to 3 expansion arrays to attain capacities of up to 64TB.

The SASmaster arrays are enclosed in 2U or 3U rackmount chasses and feature redundant power supplies for high availability. Each system offers battery-backed cache ranging from 256MB to 2GB. In addition, all SASmaster systems offer support for RAID levels 0,1, 5, 6, 10 and 50. The SASmaster product line ranges in price from $10,000 to $41,000 for a single system, depending upon configuration and storage capacity. ...Dynamic Network Factory profile


Dell Outperforms Disk Array Market

STAMFORD, Conn - September 5, 2007 - Worldwide external controller-based disk storage revenue totaled $3.7 billion in the second quarter of 2007, a 3.3% increase over the same period in 2006, according to Gartner, Inc.

The North American region, comprised of the US and Canada, grew its revenue by 4.5% year over year. The top 7 vendors by revenue were:-

1 - EMC - up 8.6%
2 - IBM - up 4.4%
3 - HP - down 2.9%
4 - Dell - up 25.1%
5 - Hitachi - up 0.7%
6 - Network Appliance - up 7.2%
7 - Sun Microsystems - down 36.%

Other vendors overall increased revenue 8.2%. ...Gartner profile, Market research, RAID systems


Adaptec Announces eSATA Adapter for PCI Express

MILPITAS, CA - September 5, 2007 - Adaptec, Inc. today announced the availability of a new 2 port SATA controller for PCIe.

The Adaptec 1225SA RAID controller installs in any available PCIe slot, and offers two external SATA ports with speeds up to 3Gbps using 2 meters cable length. The card is equipped with Adaptec Storage Manager software for ease of use and improved management, and offers RAID levels 0, 1, JBOD and eSATA hot-swap compatibility, enabling users to easily move drives or volumes from one system to another. MSRP is $75. ...Adaptec profile


Blackbird SATA RAID Nests on Desktops

TORRANCE, CA - August 14, 2007 - MicroNet Technology today rolled a out a new compact e-SATA storage array for SMB and SOHO customers.

The new SR-4 Blackbird SATA RAID array is MicroNets answer to the traditionally costly and bulky direct-attached JBOD/RAID disk array. It packs 4 SATA drive bays into a compact 12-pound device with a desktop footprint about the size of a sheet of notebook paper. Read performance is upto 240MB/sec, and write performance is upto 200MB/sec. OS support includes Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Each unit is bundled with an eSATA RAID controller (PCI-Express or PCI-X). The SATA-2 drives plug directly into the units backplane, eliminating the complexity of drive cabling and simplifying the process of swapping out drives for repairs or upgrades.

MicroNets SR-4 Blackbird SATA RAID arrays are available in 1, 2,3 and 4 TB capacities. Pricing starts at $599 for a 1TB configuration with a PCI-X card and ranges up to $ 2,499 for the 4TB model with a PCI-Express card. ...MicroNet profile, Animal Brands in the Storage Market


Qsan Ships iSCSI-SAS RAID Controllers

Taipei, Taiwan - July 27, 2007 - Qsan announces the general availability of 2 new single-board RAID controllers - the P200C and S500C.

These are available in 8 / 12 / 16 / 24 bay rackmount models depending on different form-factor requirements.

P200C is a high performance iSCSI-SAS RAID controller built around Qsan's RAID/iSCSI stack. With 4x GbE ports connected to the host, either working independently, trunking, or MPIO together, Qsan lab data shows up to 120,000 IOPS (512 byte block-size). P200C can achieve up to 600MB/sec including both read and write. The P200C supports upto 80 drives (128T) via expander JBODs.

Other included features are:- RAID 6, on-line migration, web-based management and QSnap snapshot. Qsan has certified P200C with VMware ESX server based on many customer requests.

"P200C is the strong and unique answer to the iSCSI doubters in the market: those who think iSCSI is slow, those who think iSCSI is low-end, and those who does not believe server-based iSCSI is reliable." said Eric Kao, sales & marketing VP in Qsan.

S500C is a SAS-SAS RAID controller built upon Intel's IOP341. Qsan lab data shows up to 1GB/sec maximum performance. ...QSAN profile


LSI Passes 1 million SAS RAID Chips Milestone

MILPITAS, Calif., July 17, 2007 - LSI Corp today announced it has shipped more than 1 million SAS RAID-on-Chip ICs.

"Reaching this volume so quickly (in just 18 months) validates our strategy of entering the SAS market from its inception and being one of the first companies to deliver a solution," said Dan Roehrich, LSI's VP of marketing.

IDC estimates that SAS hard disk drive shipments to enterprise storage and server applications in 2007 will be more than triple 2006 shipments. IDC predicts SAS will achieve 26% enterprise market share in 2007, out-shipping all other drive interfaces. ...LSI profile, RAID systems, storage chips


ATTO Claims Fastest SAS RAID Controller

Amherst, NY - July 10, 2007 - ATTO Technology, Inc. today announced that internal benchmark testing has demonstrated its ExpressSAS RAID controllers to be the industrys highest performance overall Serial Attached SCSI products.

ATTOs ExpressSAS controllers demonstrated more than 10x faster performance than competitive products in a series of bandwidth-stressing benchmark tests, such as running multiple backup streams, enterprise databases and document management applications. The ExpressSAS products are built around Intels new IOP348 with a dual core storage processor that allows individual processor cores to be dedicated and optimized for SAS protocol processing and RAID algorithms. ...ATTO profile, RAID controllers


Pivot3 Launches RAIGE

Spring, Texas – June 12, 2007 – Pivot3 Inc today announced an IP-based storage cluster that it claims delivers up to 5 times the performance at the cost of competitive solutions.

The Pivot3 RAIGE (RAID Across Independent Gigabit Ethernet) Storage Cluster is the first system based on Pivot3's block-level virtualization architecture. Pivot3 RAIGE is available now starting at an MSRP of $17,499.

By leveraging off-the-shelf components and utilizing a highly parallelized I/O architecture, Pivot3 RAIGE Storage Cluster delivers a much better cost-per-capacity and price/performance ratio than competitive products, said Arun Taneja, founder and analyst of Taneja Group. Unlike other block-based clustered storage products, Pivot3 is a truly distributed RAID architecture. We see this technology as shaking up the category and raising the bar for what constitutes a high-performance, easy-to-use, fault-tolerant IP-based storage system. ...Pivot3 profile, RAID controllers


MicroNet Offers Instant RAID for SMBs

TORRANCE, CA - June 5, 2007 - MicroNet Technology today introduced the Platinum RAID Pro.

With upto 5 terabytes (price $4,499) it combines the highest capacity of any eSATA disk array on the market and requires no drivers to be installed.
The unit is factory-configured for RAID 5 so users can simply plug it in and immediately enjoy the benefits of parity RAID data protection.

The capacity breakthrough achieved by MicroNet is the result of design innovations in the host bus adapter and RAID controller to eliminate the 2 terabyte volume size limitation that restricts the available capacity of alternative eSATA-based disk arrays.
news image MicroNet - click for profile
To take advantage of this host computers must be running a modern operating system, including Windows Server 2003 and above, Windows Vista, recent Linux releases and Mac OS X, that is not burdened with older ATA address limitations. ...MicroNet profile, RAID systems
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RAID controllers
RAID controllers

NAS
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low  cost - 3U 12 bay USB / FireWire / SATA / Infiniband  storage
3U 12 bay RAID storage
USB / FireWire / SATA / Infiniband
from Norco Technologies

3ware SAS hardware RAID controllers
3ware SAS RAID Controllers
from AMCC

serial attached scsi chassis from Enlight 1u to 5u
Serial Attached SCSI Chassis 1U to 5U
from Terabytes Server Storage Tech
.
RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

In the mid 1980's when this term first entered public awareness, you could buy 2 types of disk drives, either low cost drives such as used in the average PC, or high speed high performance mainframe drives as used by Quantel in its digital video effects systems.

The huge market for PC disks soon became the leading edge technology drivers for disk storage and overtook the larger minicomputer and mainframe form factor disks in speed, reliability and capacity.

By the late 1990s RAID systems using PC form factor disks had become the most common form of bulk storage in enterprise servers and even some (Unix) mainframes.

Today the original RAID concept remains valid even though hard disks have changed form factors many times in the past 20 years (8", 5.25", 3.5", 2.5", 1.8" and below 1") and the concept may be useful in the near future when the "disks" in the array could actually be flash solid state disks and not traditional hard disks.

You can create a virtual disk array which looks electronically just like a bigger ordinary disk, by attaching a bunch of disks working in parallel and connected to a RAID controller interface.

The combined system can be programmed to provide desirable characteristics such as faster data throughput (for example a 4 disk wide system could have a data throughput capability 4 times faster than a single disk).

RAID can also provide fault tolerance, because redundant disks can be added into the array and the data split up in such a way with redundant error bits that there is no loss of data if any single disk fails (or if 2 disks fail in some RAID configurations) - provided the dead disk(s) is replaced and the data rebuilt before the next failure occurs.

RAID doesn't always result in an application speedup. It can slow down the access time in some types of application in which the data sets are small and randomly located - because the latency of the RAID controller is additional to the disk's own access time. ...from Megabyte's Storage Dictionary
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Teralyte removable disk to disk backup for SMBs
ejectable disk to disk backup for SMBs
Teralyte from Idealstor
.
Nibble Re: RAID Jargon

By the process of marketing magic the humble RAID has been turned into other more advanced and desirable sounding products, which you will want to rush out and buy immediately.

The RAID system concept itself is simple enough, being a box of disk drives with self healing properties which can be run in parallel for faster data throughput. But that's not sexy enough for most storage product marketers. So we now have the following refinements.
  • RAID connected by SCSI, Firewire or IDE can be called a DAS (Directly Attached Storage). The RAID has to be connected by something, but "DAS" sounds more modern, and indicates that you chose this method of connection in preference to all the others.
  • RAID connected by Fibre-channel can be called a SAN (Storage Area Network). That sounds better already.
  • RAID connected by Ethernet can be called a NAS (Network Attached Storage).
  • RAID connected by both Fibre-channel and Ethernet can be called a NUS (Network Unified Storage).
  • Even better than plain old vanilla NUS,apparently, is SUS, or Scalable Unified Storage, coined by the short lived startup Broadband Storage.
  • More likely to endure than either NUS or SUS, is market research company Gartner's term FAS for Fabric Attached Storage which also lumps NAS and SAN together.
  • RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) is an Adaptec creation
  • MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) is a whimsical term from COPAN Systems used for disk to disk backup systems.
  • RAIGE - (RAID Across Independent Gigabit Ethernet) is a creation of Pivot3 although some of concepts sound similar to how Google implements its internal storage infrastructure.
  • DVRAID - is a proprietary RAID technology from ATTO Technology that is "optimized for digital content creation environments that require protection in the event of a disk failure without the performance penalty traditionally seen with parity RAID."
  • SAID - Self-maintaining Array of Identical Disks - a possibly overambitious term from Atrato
  • Finally, a RAID not connected to anything at all can be called a LUS (Lonely Unloved Storage)...

    No, I just made this one up. But you can see the basic principle at work here. And no doubt there will be other terms later for RAID connected by the Internet or Infiniband.
See also:- Megabyte's Storage Glossary which includes definitions of the many other strange terms which appear from time to time in these pages.
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SD3000 / SD3000X2 high availability SSDs - click for more info
high performance, high availability
FC solid state disk accelerators
from Solid Data Systems
.

Nibbles Re: RAID History

IBM received the first patent for a disk array subsystem in 1978, and co-sponsored the research by the University of California at Berkeley that led to the initial definition of RAID levels in 1987.

IBM launched the first modern style RAID systems in 1990


It wasn't until the late 1990's that RAID technology became a "must-have" building block in commercial Unix servers.

In the future RAID technology will be already integrated in most home PC's and entertainment systems, because home users don't do backups, but they will have large digital entertainment libraries which won't fit neatly onto a single disk.

See also:- this RAID History - (this page) back in

RAID - 1999
RAID - 2000
RAID - 2001
RAID - 2002
RAID - 2003
RAID - 2004
RAID - 2005
RAID - 2006

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click to read RAID article by Infortrend
10 Ten Tips for a Successful RAID Implementation - article by Infortrend

Editor:- In the 20 years since I first worked on RAID I've read and published countless articles about this subject.

So what can a new RAID article tell you?

Plenty of practical stuff - from a modern perspective. ...read the article , ...Infortrend profile
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WipeMASSter Disk Sanitizers erazes 9 disks to Dod standards at hardware speed
WipeMASSter Hard Disk Sanitizers
from Intelligent Computer Solutions
.

Nibble:- RAID and Me

I
first came across the concept of RAID in 1986 when I joined a company called Databasix as their hardware engineering manager.

Databasix, based in Newbury in the UK, was founded by John Golding from the nucleus of an earlier company he had been in called Microconsultants.

Microconsultants had spawned rich sister company Quantel. Peter Michael, who had been the business and technical brains in both these earlier companies, gave Databasix a very generous start in life from what I could see by the pool of talented people and money which had mostly been already spent when I joined the 70 people or so in the new "start-up".

Among the many things on my to-do list was to build a working RAID controller and RAID array demonstration system.

"I don't know much about hard drives" - I said. I could afford to be honest - because these guys had already seen the worst when they first met me. My VC backed networked data acquisition company was going bust and they had been a potential buyer.

"There's not much too it." My boss said. "Just read the manuals that come with the disk drives. We want to see if RAID will give us fast real-time disks at a cost that's significantly less than the video disks from Japan used by our sister company Quantel."

"OK" I said. "I don't know much about RAID either."

"Nobody does. Here's a bunch of articles. They tell you all you need to know. We'd like the demonstration ready in 3 weeks."

"That sounds like a very short time to me."

"We've already ordered the disks to save time. You order whatever chips you need, and use some of the software guys to help on this."

From memory, I think I got the demo deadline pushed out to about 4 to 5 weeks.

We also had an Artificial Intelligence demo being worked on at the same time by about 50 software engineers, and a parallel computing demo, but the RAID functionality was the "must have" thing which could not be easily dropped from the sales plan.

We did build a working 4 drive RAID system. One of our biggest problems had been the high rate of Dead On Arrival disk drives. That caused a lot of problems which we initially blamed on the software. Hard drives were a lot more sensitive in those days and could be killed just by putting them down on your desk.

But by then I knew a lot more about disks and realised that the Inexpensive Disks we used in our demonstrator weren't anywhere near as fast as they could have been, because they were the wrong standard. Then, as now, there were many interface standards for disk drives. If you're going to build a fast system then you might as well use fast building blocks. Dataquest was telling me that we should probably be using SCSI instead.

As my imposed wish lists started to pile up and commercial reality started hitting my new employer, I decided that it would be a heck of lot easier to partner with a disk controller company which was already down this part of the curve, and later we became a beta site for dozens of manufacturers of processor cards, array processors, hardware interfaces, memory and disk drives as we tried to make a business out of selling the technology curve to military buyers almost before it was really there. That was great fun, but a different story.

It was about 10 years after that before RAID systems next appeared in my life - when RAID companies like DEC (acquired by Compaq and now part of HP) and Data General (acquired by EMC) started promoting their RAID systems to readers of my Sun foused SPARC Directory.

Nearly 12 years after my first acquaintance with RAID it became one of the first 4 product categories here on STORAGEsearch.com. And although the interface patterns have changed over the years, from DAS SCSI, then Fibre-channel SAN, then Ethernet NAS, and then iSCSI, the ideas inside the box have remained the same.

When you get to be an old guy like me, it's a lot easier if some of the new stuff which hits your brain, is actually a rehash of old stuff.


...more about Databasix.

I didn't want to interrupt the narrative flow above - but the core Directors at Databasix when I joined were:- John Golding, Andrew Bruce, Ray Potter and Dan Boxshall.

research would have come in useful here
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