MPZ), today announced that it will offer expansion shelves to complement its DataFRAME 2112 SAN appliance, which the company introduced late in 2007. The new expansion capability enables customers to increase the capacity of their SAN environment in a simple and flexible manner, such that both SAS and SATA drives can be deployed within the same shelf and across shelves to optimize the overall SAN design for a wide variety of workloads.

In addition to the increased storage capacity, MPC will be offer 10-Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for the DataFRAME 2112 via an add-in card, which will enable customers to achieve storage access and throughput performance at state-of-the-art iSCSI speeds.

The new expansion capability makes use of a storage expansion shelf called the E-842R, which is a storage product that MPC integrated into its product line as a result of its acquisition of the Gateway Professional business in October 2007. The E-842R is a 2U storage unit that houses 12 SAS and/or SATA drives. Using multiple E-842R shelves connected to the DataFRAME 2112, the overall system can scale from 12 hard drives in a single DataFRAME 2112 2U appliance, up to 72 hard drives in a 12U configuration, and 144 hard drives in a High-Availability (24U) design. Both the E-842R and the DataFRAME 2112 utilize high-performance and energy efficient system designs from Xyratex (http://www.xyratex.com), a leading provider of enterprise class data storage subsystems and storage process technology.

Choice and Flexibility

'The DataFRAME 2112 SAN appliance is a totally open, standards-based, enterprise-class data protection and disaster recovery solution for professional customers,' notes Greg Wolff, area vice president of product marketing for MPC. 'With our new storage expansion and 10GbE connectivity, customers can increase the capacity of their SAN environment over time and mix and match SAS and SATA drive technologies so that any drive type can be assigned to any application.'

This announcement follows on the heels of storage software leader FalconStor's release (http://www.falconstor.com/en/pages/?pn=Press&gid=525) of its optimized IPStor(R) version 6 platform, which is part of the software stack that makes up the DataFRAME 2112.