RAID Inc. Storage Arrays

The RAID Inc. product family consists primarily of storage arrays for SAN or NAS implementations. The product family itself is divided into several brands, including Falcon, Magellan, Raven, Maverick, Grid-X Backup, Razor, Xanadu, X4, X48, and now the X2-IB. Within the product family are arrays facilitating FC, SAS, iSCSI and now InfiniBand connectivity and including SAS, FC, or SATA physical drives.

Current entries listed in the product line include:

- The Magellan series, offered in 12 or 16-bay enclosures up to 5 of which can be combined into a single storage pool. The modules themselves can be loaded with either SAS (15,000 RPM) or SATA II (7,200) drives with mix-n-match support, and interface controllers are offered in 4 Gb/sec FC or 3 Gb/sec SAS flavors. Single or dual controller platforms are available, with RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 supported.

- The Falcon series, which are SATA II drive enclosures offered in 8, 12, 16, 24, and 48 bay flavors. Connectivity is via FC (4 Gb/sec).

- The X4, an all 4 Gb/sec FC (drives and interface) 3U enclosure (16 bays) with expandability to up to 224 drives. Dual controllers are featured, as are support for 3 spare disk types: dedicated, global, and enclosure-specific.

- Raven II, an 8 port iSCSI enclosure with SATA drives. The 3U enclosure has 15 removable drive bays and sports RAID levels of 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50.

- Maverick II, a SAS interfaced module with room for 8 3.5 inch SATA II drives. The Maverick II is a 5.4 x 14.2 x 12.8" module (tower or desktop deployment), and supports RAID levels of 0, 1 (0+1), 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, and 60.

- Grid-X Backup, a grid-based storage platform shipped in turnkey configurations consisting of combinations of Accelerator Nodes (for performance) and storage nodes (for capacity). Grids can be expanded as needed by the addition of storage or accelerator nodes. Features of the platform include global de-duplication (which the vendor states combines sub-file inline deduplication with additional compression); Distributed Resilient Data (DRD) technology, which, at it's default level of three provides protection against the loss of up to 3 disk or node failures; NFS/CIFS access; and RepliGrid, an optional DR feature providing asynchronous grid-to-grid replication.

- Razor, a 1U enclosure accessed via 4 Gb/sec FC (four ports) or SAS (two ports) and loaded with 12 3 Gb/sec 2.5" SAS drives. The Razor boasts RAID levels of 0, 1(0+1), 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, and 60; and multiple units can be stacked to a maximum of 60 drives.

- Xanadu, consisting of combinations of controller units and disk enclosures (both 2U), each of which houses up to 12 SAS/SATA drives. A single controller can handle up to 11 additional disk enclosures, making the maximum drive total 144 per system. Access is via 4 (standard), 8, or 12 FC ports. Xanadu can be upgraded to the vendor's Xanadu II for additional capacity; a 5U modular platform that can scale up to a maximum of 1,536 SAS or SATA drives and up to 64 FC ports.

- X2-IB, the newest entry in the line, a modular platform consisting of 5U combined disk array/controller nodes and 2U disk enclosures; with support for up to 64 4 Gb/sec FC ports and up to 1,536 disk drives (individual systems can be scaled to 16 FC ports and 384 drives; with the vendor's "X-bar" architecture able to join up to 4 systems for combined total of 64 FC/1,536 drives). The key feature of the X2-IB system is its support for InfiniBand communications; client hosts access the platform via InfiniBand, while a specialized data transport layer converts the FC-based storage to InfiniBand. Total potential performance of four X-bar connected systems is listed by the vendor as 160 GB/sec (sequential read/write).

Also available from the vendor are their Microsoft Storage Server Enterprise Edition-based SAN/NAS Fusion offering, providing NAS features with RAID Level 10 protected FC or iSCSI host storage; and the X48, a 1U, dual-controller RAID head (no disks) with support for 8 or 12 FC ports and scalability to up to 14 FC-based JBODs or 3 SAS-based JBODs (up to 272 drives, total).

With the exception of the X2-IB, the RAID Inc. product line is available now. A base X2-IB (48 TB) is expected to be priced around $170,000, with availability targeted to later this month.

Visit the vendor's Web site for further information.