Eternus extended with SAS, iSCSI and SSD
Fujitsu completes tidying up exercise
Posted in Enterprise, 12th October 2009 09:49 GMT
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Fujitsu has added iSCSI and SAS interfaces plus solid state drive support to its Eternus DX hard drive brand, completing a range tidy-up begun when it took over full control of Fujitsu Siemens Computers in March.
FSC's FibreCAT SX60 and SX80 were small/medium business, twin-controller arrays, with Fibre Channel connectivity. Fujitsu also had an Eternus 2000 array, aimed at a similar customer base, with SAS and iSCSI connectivity. The larger-scale enterprise-class drive arrays in its product locker were the Eternus 4000 and 8000.
Fujitsu aimed to converge the SME products into a single range, branded Eternus DX. An initial step was to rename the FibreCAT SX60 and SX80 as Eternus DX60 and DX80 products in June.
A month before that the company chose STEC as a supplier of solid state drives (SSDs) for its Eternus drive arrays.
These strands of activity have now come together with the Eternus DX60 and DX80 getting SAS and iSCSI alongside the existing Fibre Channel, and thus replacing the Eternus 2000 range. The DX60 can have up to 24 15,000rpm SAS hard disk drives (HDDs), with either 300 or 450GB capacity, and the DX80 up to 120. They can also use so-called nearline SAS drives, in 1TB or 750GB capacities, spinning at 7,200rpm. SATA drives are not supported.
Both models can have 2 to 4 Fibre Channel host interfaces, or the same number of 3Gbit/s SAS or 1Gbit/s iSCSI interfaces. The DX60 has 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel while the high-end DX80 can have the faster 8Gbit/s, and also gets 100 or 200GB SSDs.
Both products feature include eight snapshots, extendable to 512 (DX60) and 1,024 (DX80), RAID migration, Data Block Guard, redundant copy, disk encryption, and an Eco-mode function, based on MAID (Massive Array of Inactive Disks) technology that lets administrators spin down disk drives that are currently inactive, and so save electricity.
There's more information here. ®
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