Hardware Today: Restoring the Romance of RAID Page 2

Not So Sexy

Although RAID 6 gets the bulk of the coverage, it is still a relatively new and untried technology. But it certainly holds enormous promise on the immediate horizon. In the meantime, more mature RAID offerings continue to hit the market, though without the same fanfare.

Sun Microsystems, for example, upgraded its Sun StorEdge 6920 system. It holds up to four RAID arrays with a total capacity of up to 65 TB according to Sun’s Hill. Its management features enable it to operate and mange EMC and other storage units from one console.

“The Storedge 6920 has an aggregate bandwidth of 800 MB per sec and 240,000 I/O per sec,” said Hill. “It offers high-end features at a midrange price.”

RAID specialist Infotrend is also focusing on making traditional RAID configurations better. Its EonStor F16F-R2021 is a 16-bay redundant controller RAID subsystem with an independent host connection, as well as drive loop expansion modules for better channel and data availability. It supports up to 124 drives.

The EonStor A12E-G2121 combines a wide range of possible RAID configurations (not RAID 6) with iSCSI to offer lower-cost storage on Ethernet networks.

“The A12E is ideal for disk-to-disk volume distribution, data backup, storage consolidation, and replication among networked servers,” says Thomas Bayens, director of marketing at Infotrend. “It is almost as good as the F16F and a lot cheaper.”