News

posted on 08 April 2008 05:31

OEM drive array supplier Dot Hill has introduced its first serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drive array.

The 2530 RAID array has a 2U rack shelf enclosure with dual active-active controllers, 12 SAS or serial ATA (SATA) II drives, and two 3GBit/s interfaces and 1GB of mirrored cache per controller. It is the latest development of Dot Hill's Series 2000 base platform and R/Evolution architecture which also supports Fibre Channel and iSCSI.

SAS and SATA drives can be intermixed in the enclosure or in expansion trays and capacity ranges from 1.7TB up to 56TB  (with 1TB drives).

Data protection features include up to 16 snapshots and volume copies. A purchasable license increases the number of snapshots to 64. Multi-path I/O (MPIO) is standard.

The product uses super-capacitor technology instead of battery-backed cache.

Dana Kammersgard, Dot Hill's president and CEO, said the 2530 is currently in evaluation and qualification testing by nearly one-third of Dot Hill’s more than 25 OEM and SI partners worldwide.

SAS technology is beginning to stretch its wings. Yesterday Seagate announced the first 1TB SAS drive and also demonstrated a 6Gbit/s SAS interface.
 
Evaluation units of the 2530 are now available, and Dot Hill expects general availability of the 2530 in the second quarter of 2008.

Dot Hill may well introduce SFF (small form factor) 2.5-inch drive products later this year. SFF SAS drives with a 6Gbit/s interface would make a potential alternative to trays full of 3.5-inch Fibre Channel drives, offering possibly equivalent or better performance without the need for any Fibre Channel infrastructure.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}