JMR's Fortra FR10 and Fortra FT10 Compatible With Chaparral RAID Bridge Controllers.

JMR Electronics, Inc. announced the availability of "Plug & Play" RAID-ready disk drive enclosures that are compatible with the product offerings from Chaparral Technologies. The Fortra FRl0 and Fortra FT10 ten-disk drive RAID subsystem enclosures provide power and cooling, a SAF-TE controller and interface for environmental monitoring, ten hot-swappable 1.6-inch disk drive canisters, and controller canisters for four different Chaparral RAID bridge controllers, both Fibre Channel to SCSI and SCSI to SCSI versions. Fortra began production shipments in March this year as a JBOD product or RAID, if used with a host-based controller.

"Now, we are shipping [the subsystem enclosures] that are 'plug and play' for systems integrators, VARs, and QEMs," said Steve Katz, vice president of OEM sales at JMR. "The Chaparral G5312, G7313, K5312, and K7313 RAID controllers install in removable modules along with their (cache) backup battery packs and 'plug in' to the [enclosure] without the need to remove any covers or install any cables in our product. This not only simplifies and accelerates integration time, but [it also] provides a minimum number of point of failures. The [new] products employ no cabling anywhere in the data or power buses. The RAID controller plugs into a custom riser card [that] we provide with the product and that interfaces with our main I/O or 'personality' card, which is a single-board interface between the drive backplane and the host computer or storage expansion unit."

Fortra FR10-LS21-2SH1, compatible with the Chaparral G5312, has a MSRP of $4,590.