Features - Storage Innovations:

INFORTREND, LSI LOGIC SUPPORT LARGE RAID VOLUMES

Infortrend announced that, utilizing an LSI Logic host bus adapter (HBA), it has become the first external RAID storage vendor to provide support for storage arrays with up to 64TB capacity. This innovation capitalizes on the new 16-byte SCSI commands, which enable breaking the traditional 2TB industry limit. High capacity arrays are ideal for simplified volume management and applications involving large reference data files such as medical images.

"Taken together, Infortrend and LSI Logic have introduced the first native support for a volume size up to 64TB as a single LUN. This allows for greater economies of scale well beyond the typical 2TB SCSI limitation," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "Typically storage systems require multiple arrays to manage this much storage. By supporting up to 64TB as a single LUN, Infortrend is driving down storage total cost of ownership for its customers."

Simplified volume management has taken on particular importance as high-capacity SATA RAID arrays can now contain up to 6TB in one enclosure. Subdividing each enclosure into multiple partitions can be inefficient and present difficulties in storage management. Using standard format 512-byte disk blocks, Infortrend's latest firmware supports the new 16-byte SCSI command variations such as READ(16) and WRITE(16), which allow for 16-byte Command Descriptor Blocks (CDB), resulting in the ability to address greater than 2TB of storage and present it as a single Logical Unit Number (LUN).

"The 2TB limit has long been a barrier to efficient storage provisioning. However, by leveraging the Linux 2.6 kernel and the EonStor RAID with LSI Logic HBA combination, we can create single file systems well over 2TB," stated Erik Logan, CTO at Pogo Linux. "This provides a valuable solution for higher end markets that require a large contiguous storage area."

"As high-capacity SATA enclosures become increasingly common, and with the advent of 64-bit operating systems, the ability to support new 16-byte SCSI commands delivers a distinct advantage for users in terms of efficiency and simplicity," said Thomas Bayens, director of marketing at Infortrend. "This is especially important for the vast amount of reference data being made available for nearline applications."

Infortrend has demonstrated this capability with an EonStor SATA subsystem directly attached to LSI Logic's LSI7202XP-LC FC HBA on a Linux server platform running Novell's SUSE LINUX Professional 9.1 and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9. The Linux 2.6 kernel supports the ability to address storage volumes larger than 2TB. When combined with supporting 64-bit Operating Systems such as Linux 2.6 kernel and HBAs such as LSI Logic's 7202XP or the LSI22320 Ultra320 SCSI HBA, EonStor subsystems support Logical Drives up to 64TB in optimization for sequential mode, or 16TB in optimization for random mode.

"LSI Logic is excited about providing Infortrend the ability to introduce leading edge capacity with their RAID storage solutions," said Charlie Kraus, director of marketing and product management for LSI Logic's HBA division. "The ability of LSI Logic's adapters to support more than 2TB addressing is derived directly from the versatility of our Fusion-MPT architecture. Fusion-MPT not only allows us to provide a single driver for Fibre Channel and SCSI, it enables us to immediately support evolutionary enhancements like this new set of Read/Write commands."

The LSI Logic LSI7202XP-LC is a dual channel PCI-X HBA providing 2 Gb performance for high bandwidth applications and total bus throughput, while the LSI22320 is a high-performance Ultra320 SCSI HBA supporting 640MB per second transfer rate with two channels.