Ciprico RAIDCore Exceeds 2.2 Gigabytes per Second RAID Performance

Ciprico Inc. will be demonstrating their RAIDCore host bus adapter (HBA) in a storage server capable of exceeding 2.2 Gigabytes per second of throughput at this year's SC07 Conference. The 24-drive array using Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' UltrastarT SAS hard disk drives spans across three economical RAIDCore SAS/SATA HBAs, enabling sustained high performance operation, significantly higher capacity, and superior data management. This demonstration will occur at the SC07 High Performance Computing Conference at Booth 3248 on November 12 - 16, 2007 in Reno, NV. High performance computing is often gated by the disk I/O subsystem's ability to process tremendous amounts of data at sufficient speeds. Using RAIDCore spanning technology, multiple RAIDCore HBAs can be aggregated to build single, flat RAID arrays of up to 32 Terabytes resulting in greater performance, superior management, and improved storage density, while eliminating the I/O bottleneck. This contrasts with other storage HBAs that either aggregate all traffic through a single controller creating a bottleneck both on the PCI Express bus and in the controller's onboard CPU; or force users to stripe across RAID storage arrays using the operating system, causing performance and management issues, as well as decreased storage utilization. "The RAIDCore HBA solution from Ciprico is ideal for our high performance computing customers doing massive simulations and demanding both tremendous capacity and superior performance," said Dominic Daninger, Vice President of Engineering for Nor-Tech, a Ciprico customer. "Their highly power-efficient architectures also enable our products to provide energy-efficient, high performance storage that operates within standard AC power parameters." "The Hitachi Ultrastar 15K300 is a performance leader designed for use in the most demanding enterprise storage environments," added Currie Munce, Vice President, Enterprise HDD Business Group, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "The combination of Hitachi Ultrastar drives with Ciprico RAIDCore HBAs provides end-users and system builders an outstanding combination of performance, reliability and power efficiency." "The tremendous amount of data generated and processed in HPC environments has historically demanded very elaborate, power-hungry and expensive storage architectures," concluded Steve Merrifield, President and Chief Executive Officer for Ciprico. "Using a single server and Ciprico's new PCI Express expansion storage box, RAIDCore transcends these historic problems by simplifying the management of massive amounts of storage capacity; providing stellar performance; reducing power consumption, congestion, and latency; and decreasing the overall system cost."