Posts Tagged ‘RAID’

New Drobo Pro from Data Robotics

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Data robotics have announced a new product the Drobo Pro, an upgraded version of the popular Drobo II.

Aside from the additional capacity the 8 bay pro version boasts over the original 4 bay version the Drobo Pro now also offers an iSCSI interface along with Dual Disk Redundancy support. Both versions feature Firewire 800 & USB 2 interfaces.

Drobo‘s use BeyondRAID™ technology, unlike traditional RAID arrays you can mix an match your hard disk sizes, instantly expand the size of your volume by simply inserting new Hard disks.

we’re a big fan of the Drobo at Mach One, its simple Drobo Dashboard software & design mean you don’t need any IT skills to administer these products, in fact you don’t even need a screwdriver to install or remove the drives.

With SATA hard disks being as cheap as they are, the Drobo range offers a very cost effective storeage solution & with the iSCSI and DroboShare options many of our clients are ditching the traditional CD/ DVD archive for this near line solution.

April Newsletter

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

We’ve just sent out our April News letter featuring the new United Digital Hyperstar PCIe RAIDs.

click here to view

United Digital PCIe RAID first Look

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

So last week we took delivery of our first United Digital 9116 PCIe RAID.

Unlike traditional RAIDs that connect via either a SCSI or Fibre card the United Digital 91xx series connect directly to the PCIe bus of the host Mac. This pretty much eliminates bottlenecks caused by traditional connectivity methods.

I like the design of this raid. it has a very simple easy to use web management console, easy to set-up email notifications for if things go wrong.

The system I was testing was a 9116 a 16 bay subsystem comprising of 8 x 750Gb SATA Hard Disks. This was connected to a 2.8GHz Quad Core Mac Pro running Mac OS 10.5.6 & 6Gb RAM.

Using Xbench the results were astounding: I was getting a sustained read speed of 669 MB/sec & sustained write speed of 470 MB/sec. I compared this against an Xserve RAID (7 x 250Gb HDD @ RAID 5) which could only muster read/ write speeds of around 140Mb/sec.

With performance figures like these, couple this with 10Gb Ethernet we could potentially have a serious lower cost rival to Xsan systems.

United Digital 9116 PCIe RAID & Apple Mac Pro