Packing The SAN.Footprint is a major concern in the enterprise, especially for storage expansion. Most enterprises have only so much physical space. This is even more of a challenge when the IT installation is concerned with rack mount, but engineers at nStor (San Diego San Diego (săn dēā`gō), city (1990 pop. 1,110,549), seat of San Diego co., S Calif., on San Diego Bay; inc. 1850. San Diego includes the unincorporated communities of La Jolla and Spring Valley. Coronado is across the bay. , CA) must have college experiences in packing people into telephone booths (remember those?) because they have announced a new family of SAN storage solutions that packs eight disk drives into less than 3.5 inches (or 2U) of rack space. This puts 400GB into an exceptionally confined space Confined space is a term from labor-safety regulations that refers to an area whose enclosed conditions and limited access make it dangerous. Description A confined space is any space: 1) that has limited or restricted means of entry or exit; 2) is large enough for a . The company's NexStor 802F accepts 1-inch or 1.6-inch Fibre Channel disk drives. Pursuing this development, the company also announced the NexStor 3150, a device that integrates FC RAID controllers within the same enclosure. Industry veteran Larry Hemmerich at nStor says: "The recent release of 1U and 2U servers by major computer manufacturers is evidence of the latest trends in the IT environment where capacity expansion requirements are outpacing available rack space. Smaller servers are absolutely dependent on reliable external storage systems and those storage systems must likewise be compact to satisfy IT needs." The problem with this kind of packaging goes to thermal conductance thermal conductance A measure of the ability of a material to transfer heat per unit time, given one unit area of the material and a temperature gradient through the thickness of the material. It is measured in watts per meter per degree Kelvin. , rotational vibration, and power draw. The company developed a new cooling design that supports not only 7200RPM drives, but also the 10,000RPM products, as well. New design features, the company says, have also overcome vibration and power issues, as well. The product is SAN-ready and fabric-aware, leveraging cable-less dual FC-AL (Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop) See Fibre Channel. FC-AL - Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop. for transfer rates up to 200MB/sec (on the dual loop), but nStor's special value add, aside from the miniscule min·is·cule adj. Variant of minuscule. Adj. 1. miniscule - very small; "a minuscule kitchen"; "a minuscule amount of rain fell" minuscule footprint per GB, is the hot-swappable loop resiliency circuit cards that handle FC retiming and clock recovery on both transmit and receive signals [ldots] all this while serving as an active hub A central connecting device in a network that regenerates signals on the output side to keep the signal strong. Also called a "multiport repeater." Contrast with passive hub and intelligent hub. See hub. for cabinet daisy-chaining. The LRC (Longitudinal Redundancy Check) An error checking method that generates a parity bit from a specified string of bits on a longitudinal track. In a row and column format, such as on magnetic tape, LRC is often used with VRC, which creates a parity bit for each impacts signal degradation and support high performance. |
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