Winchester Intros New Disk Array

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data storage solutions company, today announced a new ultra high performance, enterprise-class Fibre Channel disk array that offers a unique combination of very high performance, high capacity and high reliability with RAID 6 dual parity data protection.

The companys FlashDisk FC-3494 disk arrays provide up to 28.8 TB of storage using a base unit with single or redundant RAID controllers and up to five disk-only expansion shelves with a total of 96 Fibre Channel disk drives. The enterprise class product uses 10K and 15K rpm disks with up to 300 GB capacity, for the most demanding applications including database, OLTP, financial, manufacturing, video and real-time data acquisition. The dual controller model with four 4 Gb Fibre Channel ports provides 1,500 MB per second sustained throughput and over 120,000 disk IO operations per second with cache mirroring enabled for controller failover.

“In today’s data intensive environment, performance and reliability demands have never been higher and we are proud to deliver the highest performance, highest reliability product we have ever produced in our 25 years of delivering storage,” added Mr. Joel Leider, the company’s chief executive officer. “It is perfect for large transaction processing applications as well as sequential applications where the need to increase data protection is critical.”

RAID 6 provides dual parity to protect against two drive failures and to help ensure that critical disk rebuilds, after a disk drive failure, are successful - especially important with today’s large arrays. According to the company’s white paper, “Enterprise RAID 6” (www.winsys.com), RAID 6 dual parity offers 500 to 30,000 times longer MTDL (Mean Time To Data Loss) than RAID 5. RAID 6 parity on FlashDisk is performed with hardware ASICs for high speed to ensure that RAID 6 runs at comparable speed to RAID 5.

“We were able to deliver this exceptional performance yet add RAID 6 dual parity at reasonable cost which we consider quite an accomplishment,” according to Mr. Jerry Namery, the company’s chief technology officer. “We used dedicated hardware ASICs for the compute intensive RAID 6 dual parity calculations and multiple Fibre Channel connections between the redundant controllers to mirror controller cache for potential failover,” he explained. “These two hardware innovations are why we can offer both the highest possible speed and the highest possible reliability in the same enterprise class product.”Winchester Systems Inc.