Winchester Systems® Announces 4Gb Fibre Channel Systems with RAID 6 Data Protection; Supports up to 8 TB with SATA-II drives in single enclosure

Business Wire, Nov 29, 2005

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Winchester Systems, Inc., a leading data storage solutions company, today introduced a SATA-II disk array with new high speed 4Gb Fibre Channel host interfaces and RAID 6 data protection capable of sustained operation with two simultaneous disk failures.

"This is our 8th generation FlashDisk product and we doubled both performance and data protection without increasing costs," states Dave Geene, the company's VP of Sales and Marketing. "It allows a SATA system to be deployed in applications that demand high performance and high availability but at a considerably lower cost point than SCSI or Fibre disk based systems. Typical applications are video capture and playback or other large sequential file transfer applications".

High capacity 500GB disk drives created a major concern over the increased risk of data loss in a RAID 5 array if a second drive failure occurred during extended rebuild times. FlashDisk RAID 6 eliminates the risk of data loss and closes this window of vulnerability by providing a full RAID 5 level of protection after the first drive failure occurs.

Unlike firmware-based RAID 6 implementations that are slow, Winchester Systems FlashDisk RAID 6 is hardware based using an advanced high speed ASIC. This enables FlashDisk SATA to maintain nearly a full RAID 5 level of performance with RAID 6 protection.

Included with every FlashDisk data storage solution is the Secure FlashConsole appliance, providing complete centralized management using any browser-based workstation on the LAN. FlashAlert, a 24-hour "call-home" remote monitoring and alert service is also included for one year.

Pricing and Availability: Products are available within 3 weeks, with list pricing starting at under $20,000 MSRP.

About Winchester Systems, Inc.

Winchester Systems provides network-attached storage, direct-attached storage, tiered-storage and storage area network enterprise data storage solutions. These solutions include high performance iSCSI, SCSI, SATA and Fibre Channel RAID disk arrays; tape backup devices and other high performance commercial and military grade data storage for mid-range servers including Windows, Windows Clusters, Linux, Linux Clusters, and UNIX. For more information visit Winchester Systems on the web at www.winsys.com.