American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) is shipping the first validation units of its StorTrends 1108 Network Attached Storage (NAS) and JBOD (just a bunch of disks) line.
The units are available in versions 1108-J (JBOD), 1108-N (with AMI’s NAS controller) and 1108-P (with NAS controller and AMI’s NAS software). Full availability of the StorTrends 1108 in J, N and P versions will be August 1, 2001. MSRP ranges from $4,069 to $6,029, depending on whether the unit is a JBOD or has the optional Indium and StorTrends NAS software.
The StorTrends 1108-J is a 1U eight drive dual channel Ultra160 SCSI NAS high-performance and highly scalable solution. The unit has many redundancy features, including three hot swappable dual unit fans and two hot swappable load sharing power supplies. One major advantage of the StorTrends 1108 line over any other NAS or JBOD device in the industry is its eZswap hard drive replacement mechanism.
The 1108 chassis features AMI backplanes (series 904 and 905) with four Ultra160 (Ultra320 ready) slots, single channel, horizontal (in-line) mounted drives for 1U rack chassis implementation and support for Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) v0.9 and v1.0. IPMI gives IT managers access to platform management information and control features, allowing more accurate predictions of hardware failures, diagnoses of hardware problems and the initiation of recovery actions.
The StorTrends 1108 is also available in versions 1108-N and 1108-P. Both include the same features that the 1108-J offers, but can be further enhanced with optional features, such as AMI’s Indium and StorTrends NAS software, version 1.0.
The 1108-N solution includes AMI’s Indium NAS controller, which combines AMI’s expertise in board, firmware and operating system environments. The Indium’s appliance architecture provides a scalable, high-performance platform that addresses many applications, including NAS, web servers and other embedded environments.
The 1108-P features the Indium and AMI’s custom-designed NAS software, with Network File Protocols (CIFS, NFS), Network Transport Protocols (TCP/IP) and Hardware Health Monitoring. All AMI software resides on a network upgradable flash memory device, which leaves all hard drives 100 percent available for user data.
