Mylex Corp, the Fremont, California-based RAID vendor recently acquired by IBM (CI No 3,712), will launch two new controllers next week, raising its top input/output per second (IOPS) rate to 8,000. Product marketing director Suresh Panikar said next week’s launch will feature two Ultra160/m SCSI-based controllers. The AcceleRAID 352, a two-channel PCI-based controller, is claimed to be the first commercial product to support the PCI 2.2 standard, and the controller. It will support data rates of 160 Megabytes per second, double that of previous product generations, and will retail at $999.
The AcceleRAID’s big brother, the eXtremeRAID 2000, is a four-channel controller, and each controller is capable of supporting up to 60 50-Gigabytes drives, giving it a total data capacity of 3 Terabytes. Its 8000 IOPS rate represents an improvement of 2.5 to 3 times earlier products, said Paniker, and it will retail at $2,099.
The eXtremeRAID 2000 is a SCSI-based equivalent of Mylex’s eXtremeRAID 3000 Fibre Channel drive. Each two-channel eXtremeRAID 3000 can handle up to 125 drives per channel, or 250 drives per controller, giving it a capacity ceiling of 12.5 Terabytes. The data rate on the 3000 is up to 1000 Megabytes per second.
Before its acquisition by IBM, Mylex had been talking to Big Blue about a product line to be manufactured specifically for the company. Panikar declined to go into details, but did say that IBM’s storage subsystems division will shortly be announcing an external RAID product custom built by Mylex.
