STORAGE

Verari Systems, developers of platform-independent blade-based computing and storage solutions, today announced new innovations and advanced capabilities in its BladeRack 2 VB5150 Storage Subsystem for network-attached storage (NAS) requirements in HPC and enterprise markets. This second-generation product features improved capacity, performance and functionality and the industry’s most efficient use of floor space, power and cooling. Up to 12 VB5150 subsystems can be housed in a BladeRack 2 frame for a single rack density of 576 drives - making it the world’s highest density storage system. “Verari Systems is constantly working on providing the most computing power and storage capacity for our clients in the most environmentally sensitive way we can,” said David Driggers, CTO, Verari Systems. “Our latest version of the VB5150 is another step forward toward our goal of achieving the green data center. The VB5150 delivers significant energy savings over alternative products, while delivering the ultimate in data center density.” Content enhancement to the VB5150 is key to its record-breaking density. It is comprised of the next generation VB1056S disk blade, providing a 17% increase in drive density per VB5150. The VB1056S contains 12 drives per blade and 48 drives per subsystem. BladeRack 2 storage capacities now range from 6TB up to 576TB in 8 square feet (just two data center floor tiles) utilizing 500GB, 750GB or 1TB SATA II hard drives. This flexibility enables the BladeRack 2 architecture to scale performance and capacity independently allowing more data to be stored in an existing area, and ultimately improving a data center’s energy efficiency. "Being more efficient in handling data center space, power, cooling and utilization isn't just nice to have anymore - it's mandatory. Verari was purpose built to meet these challenges and more," said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst at The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. The latest VB5150 also contains an enhanced VB1150 Storage Controller Blade. In this second-generation controller blade, performance is increased up to 38%; delivering higher throughput and IOPs and increased capacity. All key RAID levels are supported including RAID 6 and 60. Utilizing RAID 6, a VB5150 Storage Subsystem can tolerate two simultaneous disk failures, drastically reducing the risk of unrecoverable media errors during rebuilds. Verari product marketing specialists expect general availability of the new version of the popular VB5150 product to begin shipping near the end of Q2 2007. For more information on the VB5150, please visit its Web site.