Product/Service

Ciprico NETarray 1000 Fibre Channel RAID for High I/O Storage with Dual FC/AL

Source: Ciprico
Ciprico's new NETarray 1000 offers the performance, reliability, availability and servicing features demanded by today's most sophisticated computing applications
Highlights
  • Network management via Ethernet (SNMP, SMTP and HTTP)
  • No single point of failure
  • All active components are hot-serviceable
  • Ten drives in 3U vertical rack space
  • Dual RAID controllers support levels: 0, 1, 0+1, 3 and 5
  • 200 MB/second
  • 15000 I/Os per second

Ciprico's new NETarray 1000 offers the performance, reliability, availability and servicing features demanded by today's most sophisticated computing applications. If your needs call for a single high-performance storage solution to meet a mix of high-bandwidth and transactional applications, the NETarray is an ideal solution.

Dual Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL)
To meet the growing requirements for enhanced methods of storage availability and management, NETarray utilizes dual FC-AL technology, allowing two loop configurations within a single enclosure. Port Bypass Circuits have been added to maintain loop integrity during failures without user intervention. Each loop and associated Port Bypass Circuits along with all other active components are on redundant, separate hot swappable cards. This improves serviceability and increases fault tolerance by eliminating any single point of failure. Multiple loops within a single enclosure improves overall performance and provides flexibility in configuration choices including:

Standard enclosure configured as a single loop environment with a backup loop in standby mode, or
Dual loop implementation which minimizes potential bottlenecks associated with numerous drives configured on a single loop.

Ethernet for Storage Management
NETarray has a 10/100BT Ethernet port Integrated on each loop bypass card which will provide support for SNMP, SMTP and HTTP. Storage management such as installation, configuration, monitoring and maintenance can now be done over the network using a standard web browser. Error and status notification can be managed via e-mail, and for those who need support for SNMP, this is also available. NETarray continues to provide support for client/server based software utilities which manage these functions through the Fibre Channel. This provides a greater set of options when integrating the NETarray into your solutions.

Performance
Like Ciprico's other Fibre Channel disk arrays, NETarray is designed to provide sustained data transfer rates (per loop) near the upper limits of the Fibre Channel host interface's 100 MB/sec. limit. With dual Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) implementation NETarray delivers sustained performance at up to 200 MB/sec (2 Gigabits/sec) and 15000 I/O's per second.

Designed with the future in mind, NETarray has been engineered to take advantage of disk drive technological advances. Utilizing the newest Fibre Channel 7200 and 10,000 RPM drives available, the ten-drive NETarray array can achieve unparalleled performance. Over 95% of the interface bandwidth is attainable on a single loop configuration with a fully-loaded enclosure.

Capacity and redundancy
This mass storage subsystem handles any combination of disk drives in a single enclosure, from a minimum of four drives up to ten. The enclosure supports four to ten half-height 3.5" Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop(FC-AL) disk drives as well as one or two high performance hardware RAID controllers in one compact 3U high rack-mountable enclosure. Using current 73 GB drive capacities, one enclosure holds up to 730 GB; one full rack contains ten NETarray enclosures, for a total of 100 drives and 7.3 TB per rack.

Ciprico's built-in enclosure daisy-chaining capabilities provide a "user friendly" method of adding additional storage as requirements grow. NETarray conveniently upgrades to Ciprico's next generation modular RAID storage solutions, protecting your drive investment.

NETarray supports Arbitrated Loop and fabric switching industry standard Fibre Channel host connectivity options. The physical layer is determined by the use of GBICs allowing the interface to be configured as any of the standard copper or optical options. This provides for greater flexibility when designing your solutions. SAN ready, NETarray is compatible with high speed "fabrics" to provide the sharing of storage subsystems directly on the network and is a perfect fit for any shared large scale high-performance system application.

Reliability and customer support
Ciprico's industry-praised engineering and technical support teams have designed crucial system components (disk drives, loop bypass cards, power supplies and fans) to be hot-swappable for easy servicing.

Reduce the exponential growth in your cost of data storage by adding NETarray to your computing environments. It's an excellent base from which to meet your current storage requirements and to prepare for future needs.

Ciprico, 2800 Campus Drive, Plymouth, MN 55441. Tel: 763-551-4000; Fax: 763-551-4002.