LSI presents new disk arrays with 60 disks per 4u

Storage manufacturer LSI has given its storage server Engenio 7900 a facelift. The storage server can now handle SSDs and the device can drive up to 60 3.5″ disks per 4 hours.

A 4u server can accommodate up to 48 3.5″ drives, but LSI can accommodate 60 drives: the new DE6900 SATA enclosure uses front-access HDD trays. In addition to magnetic drives, the Engenio 7900server handles solid state disks from Stec. The FC4600 enclosure is to house the ZeusIops SSDs from Stec and the server would then deliver a capacity of 170,000 iops and a capacity of 201TB. Server rack capacity increases to 480TB when using 1TB magnetic storage drives.

The storage is controlled via dual-port iscsi adapters with a bandwidth of 1Gbps, or via 4Gbps or 8Gbps fiber channel connections. The Engenio offers raid levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10 and can duplicate data in various ways and store it encrypted or not. Almost all components, including the power supply, the storage controllers and the cooling are redundant and hot-swappable. The whole is controlled by a 2.8GHz ticking Xeon with 2GB memory. LSI does not announce prices yet. The company does report that revisions of the Engenio 7900 are planned: in time, the storage server must be equipped with 10Gb iscsi interfaces.