Adaptec Taps into iSCSI, Serial Storage

Adaptec is combining iSCSI and Serial ATA to deliver the company’s first external storage solutions.

Adaptec next week will formally unveil solutions for Fibre Channel and IP SANs, Direct Attached Storage, and components and software, building on its
acquisition of Eurologic to offer end-to-end storage solutions.

The Adaptec iSA1500, an iSCSI-to-Serial ATA storage array, leverages standard IP networks, existing network management skills, and low-cost SATA storage to give small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and remote and branch offices networked storage combined with high availability, management, and data
protection, says Jason Blosil, Adaptec’s product manager for iSCSI host interface solutions.

“We see iSCSI really coming into play in 2004,” Blosil told Enterprise Storage Forum. The technology, he says, “fills the space between Direct Attached Storage and Fibre Channel.”

The product targets Microsoft applications like Exchange and SQL, storage consolidation and DAS-to-SAN conversion, disk-to-disk backup, and remote and
secondary storage.

At $10,000 for a 1TB device, it’s also competitively priced.

Sawtel, a satellite connectivity and applications service provider, found that its customers’ NAS solutions were becoming too cumbersome as they grew in size. With Adaptec’s iSA1500, Sawtel says it cut the cost of a traditional SAN implementation by 83%.

Adaptec is also using SATA drives on its new Fibre Channel-to-Serial ATA storage system and companion disk drive enclosure, targeted at midsize businesses.

The Adaptec FS4500 is a highly scalable, high-availability RAID subsystem that combines Fibre Channel scalability and performance with cost-effective SATA disk drives for storage of reference and secondary data, CAD/CAM images, archived email, and streaming video and audio.

The result, says Mike McNamara, product marketing manager for Adaptec’s external storage group, is a system that acts, looks, and behaves to the customer as if it’s a collection of Fibre Channel disk arrays.

The FS4100 Serial ATA disk drive enclosure lets customers scale to 24 terabytes of direct-attached or networked storage, provides an upgrade path to fully redundant RAID subsystem storage, and can be used to expand capacity of the FS4500 and third-party Fibre Channel RAID appliances.

McNamara says Adaptec also plans a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) version of the products.

Pricing for the FS4500 and FS4100 storage arrays starts at $14,299 and $9,599, respectively.

Not overlooking its core internal storage market, Adaptec will also unveil 8- and 16-port SATA RAID controllers with data transfer rates up to 1.5 Gb/s per port. The 8-port 2810SA costs $590, while the 16-port 21610SA costs $895. The cards use the same management GUI as the company’s SCSI cards.

“We’re a leader in the SCSI controller market, and we intend to be a leader in the Serial ATA controller market,” says Robert Cox, Adaptec’s product
manager for SATA boards.

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