LSI has enhanced its Engenio 7900 storage system with a high-density SATA drive enclosure, solid-state drive (SSD) support and iSCSI host interface support.
The company said that the new enhancement also includes storage monitoring and reporting capabilities through Tek-Tools Storage Profiler. Together, these enhancements are designed to help customers optimise storage performance, reduce operational costs and manage both physical and virtual environments.
According to LSI, the new features and enhanced capabilities of Engenio 7900 include: a new DE6900 SATA drive enclosure, which is capable of housing 60 3.5-inches SATA drives in a 4U space. It provides 2.8 times greater density compared to the current sixteen-drive enclosure, enabling a 480TB system to reside within a 19-inch rack.
The company said that the new enhancements include support for STEC ZeusIOPS SSDs, which can deliver nearly 80 times the IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance of traditional drives, enabling a new tier of storage for workloads. It includes support for tiered storage area networks (SAN-tiering) via multi-protocol SAN connectivity which enables the concurrent intermixing of a new dual-ported 1Gb/s iSCSI host interface card with 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host cards.
Mixing Fibre Channel and iSCSI host cards allows less-demanding applications to run on servers using lower-cost iSCSI interfaces, producing as much as a 57% savings in infrastructure costs. Multi-protocol SAN connectivity is also available on the recently introduced Engenio 4900 storage system, the company said.
Phil Bullinger, executive vice president and general manager of Engenio storage group at LSI, said: Cost-effective midrange storage is becoming the centerpiece of the data centre, helping IT managers confront soaring data growth, escalating energy bills and flat budgets. The Engenio 7900 system incorporates innovative features that help customers lower costs, improve energy efficiency and realize the full benefits of virtualisation technology.
