Analysis

posted on 26 June 2008 17:17

There is a fourth drive array manufacturer that you may not have come across before, a fourth musketeer alongside the better-known threesome of Dot Hill, LSI and Xyratex. The disk storage D'Artagnan is Infortrend, boasting probably the most complete and widest RAID array offering of any vendor on the market.

Infortrend is a disk drive subsystem supplier, selling through a channel, like Dot Hill, LSI and Xyratex, but not to the large and well-known systems and storage providers that customers will know so well: Dell; EMC; HP; IBM; NetApp; Sun and so forth.

Instead Infortrend sells to integrators and original design manufacturers (ODMs) who put their own badges on Infortrend drive + RAID controller enclosures and integrate them into systems. The company is based in Taiwan, listed on the Taiwan stock exchange, having gone public in 2001. There are 450 employees and offices in Japan, China, also the USA and EMEA where Tony Perng is the managing director. In Europe there are units in the UK, Germany and France, and around 30 Infortrend staff, the results of good growth over the six years it has been present in the continent.

Infortrend was originally a RAID controller manufacturer with a strong R&D and Engineering focus. It expanded up the stack into drive array subsystems - adding drives and fans, a power supply and chassis to its controllers - and obviously needed a channel.

Tony Perng joined Infortrend six years ago and established Infortrend and its channel structure in Europe and reckons that with its two-tier channel of distributors and integrator/resellers it is represented by about a grand total of 2,000 channel members. That is some coverage.

Alex Young is his technical marketing director and says: "With our 52 products, no other vendor has as complete a RAID line. They have RAID products but only Infortrend focusses completely on RAID."

Infortrend has recently introduced new iSCSI products, desktop RAID systems and has a new generation of its core RAID ASIC which is 44 percent faster than the existing 800MB/sec ASIC. Young said it gives Infortrend the ability to have a modular design with a single configurable product instead of multiple different products. That makes it much easier for integrators and ODMs to build an Infortrend subsystem into their finished products, and also to change it later on.

Trends

What trends does Young see affecting the company's products?

SAS II with its 6Gbit/s bandwidth will be seen, he thinks, on the host side in 2009, complementing 8GBit/s Fibre Channel there. He doesn't think we'll see native 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel drives though whereas SAS II may appear at the drive level. He hopes that the SAS II controllers will be backwards compatible with SAS I and also with SATA II (3Gbit/s). Then you would be able to have mixed SAS and SATA drives behind a single SAS II controller.

Currently Infortrend supplies 1GbE iSCSI connectivity. It is waiting for the right time to introduce 10GbE product.

Solid State Drives

How about solid state drives (SSD)? Young said: "We have some customers testing them. A customer tested our kit with third-party SSD drives and got a good IOPS (I/Os per second) rate. With physical disk the IOPS are down to the number of spindles. With SSD the key will be the speed of the controller: the CPU must be quicker; the ASIC must be quicker; the memory must be quicker. "

Tony Perng added: "We have a team doing SSD testing, for oil and gas and military applications. There is a need to fine-tune the firmware (but) the basic technology is already there."

Young added: "SSD write performance is still not faster than HDD." He mentioned SanDisk SSDs with a satisfactory read IOPS rating but write performance of 20 IOPS compared to a Samsung SSD with a 200 IOPS write performance, about the same as a 15,000 rpm hard drive. The write performance is a key SSD metric for customers in the oil and gas market. There is no technical breakthrough known about that will solve the write performance issue. A DRAM cache might be an idea but, Young asked: " What happens when it fills? As soon as the write performance issue is solved then (large scale) adoption will start."

System software

Young said: "We have already invested heavily in software development. Snapshot backup has been around for about a year. Multi-pathing is available. We're developing volume replication, both local and remote, and it should be available in Q1 2009. Other vendors use the host computer for this, meaning an overhead. We'll implement it directly into the RAID controller - server-less replication.

Summing Up

Infortrend is a disciplined and very successful company that has built its business by focussing on its RAID controller technology and RAID-controlled disk subsystems with a variety of interfaces: Fibre Channel; SAS; SATA; and SCSI. Because of its integrator and ODM channel it is not as well-known as the EMCs and NetApps of the customer-facing storage world, or the three main OEM suppliers; the three musketeers: Dot Hill; LSI; and Xyratex.

In its integrator and ODM market though it enjoys a high quality reputation and covers the RAID disk subsystem product landscape more effectively than any other supplier. Because of the breadth and depth of its channel and the way it runs its business it is possibly in better financial health than them although less well-known. Out of sight can mean out of mind but if you're in the business of integrating RAID array subsystems then Infortrend should be firmly in your sights and in your mind.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}