We’ve just landed a few of the new Infortrend 48 Bay, 4RU FC to SAS RAID subsystems so though I’d do a quick post on what we have seen. Note that this Raid subsystem is so new it’s not even up on the Infortrend site as yet!
It’s a real beast with Dual Redundant RAID controllers each with 4 x 8Gb FC ports and 2 x 1Gb iSCSI ports. There is also a more cost effective model that only has a single RAID controller for those applications that don’t require the high availability fail-over. As well as the host ports mentioned here there are also SAS expansion ports which enable the easy cascading of four 48 drive JBOD’s bringing the maximum drive count to 240 drives. If using 3TB drives this equates to 720TB in 20RU!
The chassis also comes with the usual high availability options including redundant power supplies, cache protection with BBU and write to flash to protect any cached data in the event of an extended power outage. Like most infortrend RAID subsystems a variety of RAID options are available including RAID 0, 1(0+1), 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60. The default cache per controller is 1GB and this can be upgraded to a maximum of 4GB per controller.
You’ll see from this photo the unit is very deep and this is how they manage to pack in 48 drives in a 4RU space
What’s a bit unique about the Infortrend 48 bay is that there are 3 extendable drives trays, each one holding 16 drives. What’s cool about this is that if you have a failed drive you can carefully slide out the appropriate tray and replace the drive without the need to slide out the entire chassis as is the case with some of the competitive systems in the market place. The drives in the tray are still powered up and operating when the tray is extended so no down time needed for drive replacement – a true hot-swap solution
The view from the rear shows 3 large power supplies. Infortrend are very ‘green’ conscious and use 80 PLUS-certified power supplies delivering more than 80% energy efficiency. Great for keeping the carbon foot print down. You can also see the dual redundant hot swap RAID controllers each with 4 x 8Gb FC connections and dual 1Gb iSCSI connections. Each controller also has an Ethernet management port and a SAS expansion port which you can see clearly here.
In our case we’re loading the chassis with 2TB NL 7200 RPM SAS drives which give us the dual redundant paths to each drive and maximum reliability.
The 48 Bay RAID subsystem also comes standard with some local replication features including Snapshot and Volume Mirror/Copy. More advanced features like thin provisioning and remote replication are available as software options.
Once we have built the RAID sets and done some performance tests I’ll post some additional information
6/2/2012 – Update – whitepaper added
Infortrend have just published a whitepaper detailing some of the design features of their High-Density storage and this 48 Bay in particular. The whitepaper is titled:
EonStor DS High-Density Storage:
Key Design Features and Hybrid Connectivity Benefits
Download the whitepaper here (825KB)