- Highest performance RAID 6 in Industry
- SATA II 300 Gbps speed at all SATA II drive ports
- Tolerates two disk failures simultaneously without losing data
- Supports greater than 2TB per volume set and battery backup module
- Firmware-embedded Web Browser-based RAID manager, SMTP manager, and SNMP agent via LAN port with no software required in the 12-/16- port controller
Taipei, Taiwan, October 27, 2004 -- 2004 – Areca Technology demonstrated the PCI-Express/PCI-X to SATA RAID host adaptors, the industry's highest speed RAID 6 at Intel Developers Forum China and Taiwan held Oct 14-15 in Shenzhen, China and Oct 25-26 in Taipei, Taiwan, respectively.
The Areca PCI-X and PCI-Express SATA RAID controller comes in 4-, 8-, 12-, and 16-port configurations, but it promises to be much faster and to boast other improvements than their competitors, such as RAID 6, and SATA ll support. The new controllers are designed to support upcoming 64-bit computing applications. They support single volume set greater than 2TB via 64-bit LBAs on one controller. The Areca Series controllers are designed to protect the customer's investment in RAID. It offers online capacity expansion, RAID level Migration, Battery Backup Module, redundant flash image and enclosure management services via an integrated I2C bus. All those features come from its field-proven external RAID controller.
As storage capacities continue to increase rapidly, users need a greater level of disk drive tolerance. RAID 1 can provide greater fault tolerance, but it requires costly double disk drives on large volume sets. Users want the security of RAID 1 or better with an implementation cost similar to RAID 5. RAID 6 can offer fault tolerance greater than RAID 1 or RAID 5, while only consuming the capacity of two disk drives designated for the distributed parity data.
Areca has been leading industry technology for about 2 years, successfully developing the RAID 6 engine in Asia, which can tolerate two simultaneous drive failures without downtime or data loss. By implementing the RAID 6 engine, the RAID controllers see no performance sacrifice in multitasking environments. The new Areca RAID 6 engine is supported on its PC-X and PCI-Express SATA RAID controller and is also available in all its external RAID controllers. Customers who want to accommodate increasing disk drive capacities coupled with the lower performance and reliability metrics associated with some disk technologies such as ATA/SATA need powerful, high-performance, fault-tolerant protection found in RAID. As ATA /SATA drive densities reach 320GB and beyond, conventional parity protection techniques such as RAID 5 decrease in their calculated effectiveness, and RAID 6 technology becomes an essential ingredient to deliver enterprise-level availability. Assuming 500 GB drives, NetApp engineers calculate that, without dual parity, 5% of RAID rebuilds would fail. NetApp also ships the double-fault function as the default setting on its NearStore line of low-end filers. Intel will have the RAID 6 engine in its next generation 80331/80332 IOP processors.
The 12- and 16- port controller firmware also embeds the following features:
- The firmware contains Web Browser-based RAID manager that allows local or remote accessfrom any standard web browser via a LAN or WAN with no required software or patches.
- The firmware contains SMTP manager monitors that all system events and users can select where either single or multiple user notifications can be sent via ''Plain English'' e-mails.
- The firmware-embedded SNMP agent allows remote monitoring via LAN with no SNMP agent required.
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