Adaptec, Inc. has expanded its external RAID family of products to include the DuraStor 7220SS, a SAN-ready 2 GB Fibre Channel storage subsystem. The company said this new solution complements its DuraStor 6220SS, the SCSI storage subsystem launched last year.
“Storage based in the SAN architecture provides numerous benefits to organizations, like reduced administrative costs through centralized management of storage, improved storage availability, enhanced storage asset utilization, and potential decrease in absolute disk storage cost,” said Roger Cox, chief analyst at Gartner Dataquest. “By offering a Fibre Channel solution, Adaptec is enabling customers to choose between a direct attached storage (DAS) or a storage area network (SAN) environment,” Cox added.
The company said the DuraStor 7220SS has the ability to support LAN-free backups. It is a 3U Fibre Channel-to-SCSI storage subsystem with 12 Ultra 160 SCSI drive enclosures, a Fibre Channel RAID controller, and Storage Manager Pro software for Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Sun Solaris operating environments. Adaptec also said by adding a second (optional) Fibre Channel RAID controller, the DuraStor 7220SS can be configured for high availability. RAID level support includes 0, 1, 0/1, 3, 4, 5, 0/5, and just a bunch of disks (JBOD). The the DuraStor 7220SS can store up to 3.5 TBytes of data using 73 GB drives.