STORAGE

To address soaring demand from users for more powerful storage solutions, Silicon Graphics today unveiled the SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 RAID storage array. This marks the industry's first Fibre Channel storage array equipped with a 4Gb/second (gigabit per second) Fibre Channel interface, doubling the performance of SGI's previous offerings. The increased performance of the TP9700 means that users need far less infrastructure - adapters, cabling, switch ports, etc - to access and manage their storage. Bottom line, this results in lower cost of ownership and far simpler configurations to manage. IT managers are experiencing 80 - 200% annual growth in data. For these users, faster data access means greater productivity and shorter time to discovery. The TP9700 array can significantly reduce the time and complexity required to interact with these increasingly large data sets. "The SGI TP9700 is a dramatic breakthrough in data management, giving users more data transfer throughput than ever before with even less complexity," said Gabriel Broner, senior vice president and general manager, Storage and Software Group, SGI. "The TP9700 is a logical extension to the SGI InfiniteStorage family and a powerful foundation for data protection, management, and high-availability features that users have come to rely on from SGI." Based on the new 6998 Fibre Channel controller that is built on the XBB high-density storage architecture from Engenio Information Technologies, Inc., the TP9700 delivers across-the-board performance improvements with eight 4Gb/s Fibre Channel host - double previous models. This gives customers flexibility in how they chose to use the 1600MB/s of sustained bandwidth the system delivers. These performance improvements will be integrated into the SGI InfiniteStorage Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) platforms. "SGI and Engenio are a natural combination to deliver this market-leading technology," said Dianne McAdam, partner and senior analyst, Data Mobility Group. "Early integration with major storage market standards like SMI-S and 4 Gbit Fibre Channel is one of the reasons SGI can be viewed as a leading provider where big data is concerned." The two companies demonstrated the first 4Gb/s Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) at the Supercomputing 2004 exhibition in November 2004. The demonstration incorporated two TP9700 systems, each with 5.8 terabytes of raw storage and connected via a 4Gb Fibre Channel SAN running the SGI filesystem XFS.