Winchester Systems Introduces ''Enterprise RAID 6'' Data Protection; Superior data protection from permanent data loss

Business Wire, May 12, 2006

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Winchester Systems, Inc., a leading data storage solutions company, today introduced Enterprise RAID 6, a high performance, high reliability disk array featuring enterprise class SATA (E-SATA) disk drives and dual parity RAID 6 data protection. For many applications, Enterprise RAID 6 is an excellent higher reliability alternative to traditional RAID 5 Fibre Channel products.

"Combining the latest enterprise class, 1.2 million hour MTBF, 100% duty cycle SATA disks with RAID 6 dual parity, provides a system that has up to 30,000 times the MTDL (Mean Time to Data Loss) of RAID 5 with minimal performance loss," stated Jerry Namery, Chief Technology Officer. "By using dual custom hardware ASICs we are able to produce a RAID 6 array that is faster than most commercial RAID 5 arrays on the market today using a single ASIC or software."

With multiple terabyte arrays, the chance of a successful rebuild diminishes proportionally with the size of the array. Enterprise RAID 6 avoids the inevitability of permanent data loss not addressed by traditional RAID 5 disk arrays. Enterprise RAID 6 is also much lower cost than comparable RAID 5 configurations using Fibre Channel drives, resulting in enterprise class reliability at SATA prices.

"Enterprise RAID 6 provides a unique and unmatched combination of reliability, performance and affordability in a truly open storage product that is in its eighth generation of development," stated Joel Leider, CEO at Winchester Systems. "With the introduction of higher capacity drives and more drives per RAID array comes longer rebuild times and a longer window of vulnerability to rebuild failures and second drive failures. Larger disk arrays increase the risk of data loss during rebuild to the point of near certainty since every block on the remaining disks need to read correctly for a successful rebuild. An Enterprise RAID 6 storage system continues to provide RAID 5 protection after the first disk drive failure and closes the window of vulnerability."

Enterprise RAID 6 is perfect for most critical high availability applications including security, medical imaging, video, backup and other sequential applications, as well as many database and transaction oriented applications.

A technical white paper, "Enterprise RAID 6", is available on the company's website.

Pricing and Availability: Systems with Enterprise RAID 6 have a list price starting at under $20,000 MSRP.

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, E-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.