Winchester fires up 28.8TB storage boxes

US-based storage vendor Winchester Systems has beefed up its enterprise Fibre Channel disk array offering with the FlashDisk FC-3494.

The FC-3494 provides up to 28.8TB of storage using a base unit with single or redundant Raid controllers, and up to five disk-only expansion shelves with a total of 96 Fibre Channel disk drives.

The unit uses 10K and 15K rpm disks with up to 300GB capacity, targeted at the most demanding applications including database, financial, manufacturing, video and real-time data acquisition.

The dual controller model with four 4Gb Fibre Channel ports provides 1,500MB per second sustained throughput and over 120,000 disk IO operations per second with cache mirroring enabled for controller failover.

Raid 6 provides dual parity to protect against two drive failures and to help ensure that critical disk rebuilds, after a disk drive failure, are successful.

Winchester said that Raid 6 dual parity offers 500 to 30,000 times longer 'mean time to data loss' than Raid 5.

Jerry Namery, chief technology officer at Winchester, said: "We used dedicated hardware ASICs for the compute intensive Raid 6 dual parity calculations and multiple Fibre Channel connections between the redundant controllers to mirror controller cache for potential failover."

The FlashDisk FC-3494 models are available starting around $20,000.