Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/17/infortrend_esva/
Infortrend steps up to Fibre Channel
Award winning ESVA arrays get new goodies
Posted in Storage, 17th June 2009 14:37 GMT
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Second-tier drive array supplier Infortrend [1] has revamped its product catalogue with the ESVA line - Enterprise Scalable Virtual Architecture - including both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity.
ESVA arrays include storage virtualisation, thin provisioning, distributed load balancing, array-based snapshots and replication. Infortrend says they are energy-efficient and have a high availability hardware design, featuring, for example, redundant controllers. The products are offered to mid-range businesses and, congratulations to Infortrend, have been awarded ‘Best Choice: Data Storage Product’ by Computex Taipei 2009, the world’s second largest ICT exhibition.
The ESVA-F20 is the entry-level Fibre Channel SAN model, with 4Gbit/s or 8Gbit/s connectivity and either 2.5-inch SAS drives or 3.5-inch SAS or SATA drives. The F40 is a 1U enclosure supporting up to 12 2.5-inch drives and 1.8TB of capacity. It can scale to 7TB with expansion enclosures and has 4 by 4Gbit/s FC ports. The F60 will be larger still and will be announced later this year.
On the iSCSI side are the ESVA-E20, scaling to 64TB of SATA storage with eight 1Gbit/s Ethernet ports, and the E60 featuring SAS drives and a maximum 19.2TB capacity.
ESVA arrays can be aggregated to create larger pools of storage in a scale-out design. Infortrend says the ESVA architecture has a dynamic virtualised ‘scale-out’ mechanism, which enables on-the-fly scalability, better capacity utilisation and data read/write load balancing. Array capacity and performance can be incrementally increased as needed. Energy-efficiency is enhanced with smart drive spin-down.
Infortrend has upped its drive array game from the current EonStor products. The ESVA details are slightly different [2] from what was indicated earlier in the year, but there's enough here for its channel to be pleased. No pricing details were released. ®