Packing The SAN

Computer Technology Review,  May, 2000  by Mark Ferelli

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Footprint is a major concern in the enterprise, especially for storage expansion. Most enterprises have only so much physical space. This is even more of a challenge when the IT installation is concerned with rack mount, but engineers at nStor (San Diego, CA) must have college experiences in packing people into telephone booths (remember those?) because they have announced a new family of SAN storage solutions that packs eight disk drives into less than 3.5 inches (or 2U) of rack space. This puts 400GB into an exceptionally confined space.

The company's NexStor 802F accepts 1-inch or 1.6-inch Fibre Channel disk drives. Pursuing this development, the company also announced the NexStor 3150, a device that integrates FC RAID controllers within the same enclosure.

Industry veteran Larry Hemmerich at nStor says: "The recent release of 1U and 2U servers by major computer manufacturers is evidence of the latest trends in the IT environment where capacity expansion requirements are outpacing available rack space. Smaller servers are absolutely dependent on reliable external storage systems and those storage systems must likewise be compact to satisfy IT needs."

The problem with this kind of packaging goes to thermal conductance, rotational vibration, and power draw. The company developed a new cooling design that supports not only 7200RPM drives, but also the 10,000RPM products, as well. New design features, the company says, have also overcome vibration and power issues, as well.

The product is SAN-ready and fabric-aware, leveraging cable-less dual FC-AL for transfer rates up to 200MB/sec (on the dual loop), but nStor's special value add, aside from the miniscule footprint per GB, is the hot-swappable loop resiliency circuit cards that handle FC retiming and clock recovery on both transmit and receive signals [ldots] all this while serving as an active hub for cabinet daisy-chaining. The LRC impacts signal degradation and support high performance.

COPYRIGHT 2000 West World Productions, Inc.
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