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Promise Technology speeds up range with Jasper Forest

The company's latest virtualisation-friendly storage platform has higher input and output rates than previous generations, thanks to Intel's processor architecture
Written by Jack Clark, Contributor

Promise Technology has released its Ex30 Raid storage platform range, which it says delivers a four-fold performance increase over previous generations by using Intel's Jasper Forest processor architecture.

The storage platforms, released on Monday, scale from 8TB to 384TB and use Intel's Nehalem-based Xeon C5500 and C3500 processors — code-named Jasper Forest —to increase throughput for input and output (I/O) requests, according to Promise Technology. The chips, designed for storage platforms, have hardware Raid support and on-chip PCI Express to reduce latency.

The processors are key to helping the company respond to an increasing demand from companies using virtualisation for greater I/O speeds, Albrecht Hestermann, Promise Technology's EMEA marketing director, told ZDNet UK on Monday.

"Everything related to storage virtualisation, server virtualisation and cloud computing is looking at higher I/Os," Hestermann said.

The Ex30 series has a data transfer rate roughly four times greater than its predecessor, the Ex10 series — almost 6Gbps vs 1.5Gbps for the Ex10 — due to the use of the new processors. The series is capable of up to 650,000 I/O operations per second. The series uses four ports of 8-Gigabit Fibre Channel for fast external connectivity, with a cache of up to 8GB per controller. It also has 6Gbps SAS/SATA, and both 1Gbps internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI)and 10Gbps iSCSI.

The VTrak Ex30 series builds on the existing Ex10 range and is targeted as an entry-level to mid-range storage product. Hestermann said the series is targeted at small to medium-sized businesses and middle enterprises. The series is available in 2U, 3U and 4U rack configurations. It will be generally available in Europe from the first quarter of 2011. 

A top-end Ex30 with 384GB of storage will cost around £100,000, Hestermann said.

Promise Technology will also bring the VTrak S3000 storage virtualisation platform to Europe in 2011, Hestermann added. The S3000 can be used to manage storage platforms such as the Ex30 and Ex10.

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