SLI-Consulting releases sub US$12,000 SAN storage for the SME market
1 April, 2004 - SLI-Consulting Pty Limited, a wholly Australian-owned data storage specialist has announced the availability of low cost Fibre Channel SANs with its StorageNetwork XA24 (SN-4200-SATA), a self-contained serial ATA (SATA) storage array that features embedded storage management software with the newly released 320 GB drives.
Aimed at the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME), the XA24 can provide users with a 1 TB configuration starting at less than $12,000.
The XA24 is a 2G-bit/sec storage system equipped with up to 16 only 250 GB SATA or 16 x 320 GB PATA disk drives. The system scales up to 5.12 TB and up to 35.8 TB with expansion JBODs. The XA24 provides four front-end Fibre Channel ports and up to 2 GB of cache memory.
Estimated end user pricing starts from $11,995 for an entry level 1 TB configuration. The investment value for a configuration with 5 TB is $18,990. A configuration with 10 TB would be at $28,990.
"They really are the first example of a low-cost, intelligent, redundant and highly scalable SAN ready RAID array," said José C Goldmann founder of SLI-Consulting.
Goldmann expects top-name storage vendors like HDS, IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., and EMC Corp. to follow suit with their own low-cost, intelligent arrays within the next 6 - 12 month.
All of the XA24 components, including the storage controller processors, disk drives, power supplies/centrifugal blower assembly modules, are hot-swappable, redundant and field replaceable units (FRU). The XA24 features dual active storage processor modules with transparent fail-over support and integrated RAID levels 0, 0+1, 3, 5, 10, 30, 50.
"We built this array for enterprise and data centres to address Tier 2 and nearline storage requirements as well as SME who want to spend between $12,000 and $120,000 on a storage system. We can provide a storage solution for organisations who are beginning to think about SANs and are saying: 'I can get a terabyte for less then $12,000, and I'll have a SAN in place that I can grow over time as dynamically as with my business requirements in mind.'," Mr Goldmann said.
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