Irvine, California-based Advanced Logic Research Inc reckons the market Compaq Computer Corp has been trying to pioneer with the Systempros is a potentially promising one, and has introduced an ALR Powerpro Array 486/33 family which uses the company’s new Advanced Disk Array controller 32-bit EISA bus master controller with 2Mb cache, upgradable to 8Mb, designed to boost disk subsystem performance, capacity and disk fault-tolerance. The controller provides disk striping, spanning and mirroring and the machines use a 33MHz 80486 processor, an eight-slot, 32-bit EISA bus, 512Kb of cache and the ability to add a second 80486 and up to 1Mb of total memory cache. The Powerpro Arrays come with either two or four 210Mb or 340Mb 3.5 drives. The company points out that unlike Compaq’s proprietary interface the Advanced Disk Array controller uses a standard interface to support MS-DOS, NetWare and Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix so there’s no need to rewrite device drivers; it also supports any industry-standard IDE drive and 8- or 16-bit AT bus devices. It performs deferred write operations simultaneously with read service requests for faster input-output throughput. The company claims 20 VAX MIPS for the uniprocessor, 40 for the dual. The Power-pro Arrays ship in a floor-standing chassis with a single processor, 17Mb of 64-bit RAM expandable to 49Mb; nine internal drive bays; 12 expansion slots – eight EISA, two AT and two proprietary; 512Kb expandable to 1Mb read-write-back cache. With two 210Mb disks that’s $17,000; with four it’s $19,000; two 340Mbs is $21,000, four, $23,000; July.
