StorageTek Advances Enterprise Disk Storage

StorageTek earlier this week announced the availability of the StorageTek D280, the latest offering in StorageTek’s D-Series product family. With the introduction of the StorageTek D280, StorageTek is advancing its position in providing best-in-class storage devices, enhanced management capabilities and replication solutions across open systems environments.

“StorageTek’s D280 continues to expand our disk-based storage solutions targeted toward customers in high I/O and bandwidth intensive environments without sacrificing flexibility and ease of management,” said Tom Major, StorageTek vice president and general manager, Disk Business Unit. “The introduction of the D280 marks our third disk product offering this year and highlights our commitment to provide our customers with world-class disk solutions with the flexibility of protecting their initial storage investments. We’re accomplishing all of this while creating the platform from which to simplify storage management and consolidate disk-based storage resources.”

According to StorageTek, the D280 allows enterprises gain a cost-effective, storage-based, integrated disk platform for disaster recovery/business continuity, storage consolidation, and high-performance computing. Designed for extremely high-performing and bandwidth intensive applications, the D280 allows users to efficiently and effectively consolidate their open systems storage by providing centrally managed, distributed storage pools tailored to specific high-performing business applications such as database, ERP, OLTP, email and Web serving. The D280 is the latest offering delivered through StorageTek’s strategic alliance with LSI Logic Storage Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of LSI Logic Corporation.

“We are excited to have StorageTek deliver the D280 storage system based on LSI Logic Storage Systems new 2 gigabit 5884 Fibre Channel storage controller,” said Flavio Santoni, vice president of sales and marketing, LSI Logic Storage Systems.” The D280, combined with the D-Series Software Suite and integrated replication services, provides a powerful cost-effective solution to satisfy the growing demand for high performance modular storage solutions.”

“D280 has been getting the reputation of a solid, reliable, high performance modular storage system, especially in throughput-hungry environments,” said Arun Taneja, senior analyst, The Enterprise Storage Group. “It should make a great addition to the product line.”

The D280 is a high-performance, open-system disk solution that gives customers the ability to grow storage at their own pace. All D-Series disk solutions are easily field upgradeable, allowing customers to maintain their original drive investment. Tested for interoperability in storage area network (SAN) environments, the D280 works with major SAN hardware and software vendors’ products and underscores StorageTek’s commitment to offer customers long-term investment protection and world-class disk storage solutions. Key features include:

• Full Fibre Connectivity — SAN-enabling Fibre Channel connectivity reduces the cost and complexity of management while gaining 2 Gigabit host connectivity and exceptional throughput to handle high I/O-per-second business class applications.
• Improved performance — over twice the performance of the current D178 D-series offering, delivering up to 772 Mbps throughput and up to 32TB of storage, using 146GB drives (available in November) and 2GB of cache.
• Easy Storage Management — with the D-series software suite, provides ability to manage both entry and Enterprise Disk Subsystem from a single management interface. Logical Unit Numbering (LUN) partitioning allows for maximum utilization of investment by providing ability to define multiple LUNs within each RAID group.
• Snapshot Copy and Remote Volume Mirroring — SANtricity Storage
  Manager 8.3 provides centralized storage management and enables
  Snapshot Copy and Remote Volume Mirroring to provide IT administrators with a centralized management software platform to replicate critical data from one storage system to another. With Snapshot and RVM, customers gain a variety of logical, physical, local and remote replication choices to efficiently utilize and protect valuable data.

The D280 disk subsystem is available Oct. 7. Pricing starts at approximately $90,000 and includes SANtricity 8.3 software, the controller and 1 TB of capacity.