IBM today announced availability of the Mylex SANArray FFx-2, a two gigabit (2Gb) per second end-to-end Fibre Channel RAID controller. The SANArray FFx-2 is the follow-on generation to the 1Gb SANArray FFx, the most widely-used external RAID controller in the server and storage subsystem OEM market.
“We designed the SANArray FFx-2 to support heterogeneous SAN environments and to offer superior performance, availability and management features,” said Suresh Panikar, director of product marketing for OEM RAID and storage systems at IBM. “The SANArray FFx-2 brings high performance and maximum data availability to SAN and clustered environments.”
According to to IBM, the SANArray FFx-2 provides dual 2 Gb/s fabric ports, which automatically adjust their modes of operation to the SAN topology–point-to-point or arbitrated loop. The controller’s autonegotiate feature enables each port to operate at the maximum speed supported by the user’s environment. Dual 2 Gb/s disk-side channels provide high performance, failure-resilient paths to a pool of storage. Both fabric and disk channels optimize performance by supporting full duplex operation. With this capability, the controller can send and receive data from the fabric and the storage simultaneously on all four ports.
In separate news announced by IBM today, the Mylex SANArray FFx-2 is now available as an integral part of IBM’s ProFibre Storage Array DF4000R, a 2 Gb RAID storage subsystem designed for system integrators, value-added resellers and OEMs supporting midrange and entry-level applications.
