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Feature Articles
1TB Western Digital RAID Edition Green Power Drives
As demand for storage continues to expand, the need for more efficient
power solutions becomes paramount. WD RE2-GP enterprise
SATA drives make it possible for large scale data centers to increase
storage capacity without exceeding available power, and in many
cases actually reduce power consumption. WD RE2-GP drives help
combat the four major challenges large data installations face – total
drive slots, maximum capacity, power allotment, and available operations
expense budget – while lowering the overall total cost of ownership.
Product Benefits
- Reduced power consumption — The combination of WD’s IntelliSeek™, IntelliPark™, and IntelliPower™ technologies brings optimized performance at industry-leading low power consumption; power is reduced as much as 40 percent.
- Helps enable eco-friendly servers — Each WD RE2-GP drive consumes an average of 4-5 watts less than competitor drives making it possible for energy-conscious customers to build servers with higher capacities, ensured reliability, and promote energy conservation.
- Lower total cost of ownership — Large data-hungry financial institutions and web service providers can save up to $10 per drive per year in electricity costs (U.S). A large data center with 10,000 drives could realize up to $100,000 in savings per year.
- 24x7 reliability — With 1.2 million hours MTBF, these drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high-capacity drive.
Designed with power savings as the primary attribute, GreenPower
drives from WD deliver exceptional power conservation, ultra-cool quiet
operation, and solid performance.
AC&NC is currently shipping these disk driveson request in all JetStor arrays capable of accepting SATA disk drives.
| JetStor SAS 516iS - SAS Drives and Quad iSCSI Channels |
iSCSI has arrived as a mainstream, high performance storage networking solution. iSCSI offers the convenience of accessing shared storage resources over your existing Ethernet network, without new hardware, switches or cabling. iSCSI support is built into current versions of Windows, Solaris, and Linux. If you previously decided against a shared storage network due to the additional infrastructure investment, iSCSI may be your solution to easier storage deployment.
Combining the deployment convenience of iSCSI with outstanding JetStor performance, the JetStor SAS 516iS 16 bay RAID array reliably delivers full quad gigabit Ethernet iSCSI throughput to 16 terabytes of storage. This remarkable performance eliminates bottlenecks in your most demanding applications, diminishing response times for increased productivity. Processing power includes a 64 bit Intel Xscale RISC processor to achieve up to 1.6 Gb/sec internal bandwidth, an iSCSI assist engine capable of full-duplex line speed throughput to all gigabit Ethernet ports, and a TCP Offload Engine (TOE).
The JetStor SAS 516iS implements all IP SAN standard and advanced features, including volume sharing with up to 16 hosts, host access control and CHAP. Full quad-channel capabilities include 802.3ad port trunking, multi-homing, active/passive LACP and Microsoft MPIO. The iSCSI offload engine further features updatable firmware to support future protocol changes.
Please call our sales department with any questions regarding this new and exciting product.
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| RAID 5 Is The Most Popular RAID Level In Use |
Offering excellent efficiency and protection, RAID 5 is the most commonly utilized RAID level for most IT applications. Like other RAID levels, RAID 5 maintains parity information separate from data, allowing the RAID system to automatically rebuild data in the event of a disk failure. Unlike RAID levels 3 and 4 that utilize a dedicated parity drive, RAID 5 distributes the parity information across all drives, interspersed with the data.
RAID 5 Configuration
Distributing the parity information across all drives eliminates the performance bottleneck of a single parity drive, improving the read and write speed of small blocks of data that are most common in commercial computing applications and popular operating systems. Data is written in "stripes" across all but one drive, and the parity information for that stripe is written to the remaining drive. The parity information is written to a different drive for each stripe. Striping the data across multiple drives allows the drives to read and write simultaneously, improving performance. The size of the data stripe can be adjusted to improve specific application performance.
RAID level 5 requires a minimum of three drives.
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Today's Terminology
MAID
Many technologies are being developed and incorporated into RAID systems to conserve power consumption. In data storage system, the most power consumption comes from spinning platters of HDD (Hard Disk Drives).
MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) is, simply put, a feature implemented in a RAID system to spin down idle disks to conserve energy. MAID incorporates a lot of technology to avoid compromise in performance and reliability while greatly reducing power consumption. It helps the environment and improves customer's bottom line.
While the amount of energy savings can vary depending on configuration, usage, environment, etc, JetStor can save 20% to over 50% of power consumption with this new MAID technology.
Additional benefits realized are:
- Decreased heat output
- Greater drive longevity
- Lower cooling requirements
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Upcoming Events
Meet the AC&NC storage experts, and "test drive" the latest storage solutions including high-density 4Gbit Fiber Channel, SAS and iSCSI RAID arrays!
ISC West
Sands Expo & Convention Center
Las Vegas, Nevada
April 2-4
E-mail Charles Lee at charles@acnc.com for CCTV rep. appointment
Storage Expo 2008
October 15-16, 2007
Olympia National Hall
London, United Kingdom
LISA 2008 Technical Conference
November 12-13, 2007
Booth #45
Town & Country Resort and Convention Center
San Diego, CA, USA
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Resources
AC&NC offers numerous resources for learning about storage, planning your next storage infrastructure, and measuring performance to get the most out of your storage investment.
RAID.edu provides the in-depth information on different RAID levels that you need to build your optimal configuration.
Sample Configurations demonstrate connecting RAID systems to multiple servers, a SAN, clustered servers, or advanced applications such as disaster recovery, iSCSI or disk-to-disk backup.
AC&NC Benchmark Tools allow you to measure the performance of your old or new storage on Windows and UNIX systems. Performance metrics reveal bottlenecks and predict new storage performance requirements.
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Feedback
Do you have comments about this newsletter? Is there a topic you'd like to learn more about? Please send us an e-mail at: editor@acnc.com
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