Fibre Channel and SATA Disk Cohabitate in New NEC Array

Published: March 7, 2006

by Alex Woodie

NEC Solutions unveiled two storage arrays this week that house Fibre Channel and Serial ATA (SATA) disks in the same chassis, which it says lowers the cost of maintaining backups.

The new S2500 and S1500 disk arrays will keep recent backups on Fibre Channel disks, which have faster read/write times than SATA disks. When it comes time to move those backups to an archive, the arrays will copy the data to the SATA disks, which are more affordable than Fibre Channel disks.

In terms of feeds and speeds, both the S2500 and S1500 will feature high-speed 4 Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces, which should provide plenty of bandwidth for the small and medium-sized companies NEC Solutions is targeting. The S1500 will have 4GB of cache memory and scale up to 17.6TB of total storage, while the S2500 will boast 8GB of cache memory and 32.7TB of total storage. Both arrays will come with RAID 6 enabled on the SATA drives, which keeps two sets of parity data (based on two different RAID algorithms) on the array so two disks can fail and the array still keeps working.

The new systems will be available this month, and will be sold through NEC's Express Partners, including Team 1 Systems and Avnet Partner Solutions. Suggested list prices for the S1500 will start at $16,610, while the S2500 storage array will start at $36,000. NEC is supporting HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Red Hat and Miracle Linuxes (Miracle is a Japanese Linux distro), and Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 with the new arrays.