Infortrend Refreshes EonStor DS Storage SystemsInfortrend Refreshes EonStor DS Storage Systems

Promoting improved storage capacity and performance, network storage vendor Infortrend has added six new models, as the B12 series, to its EonStor DS small-form-factor (SFF) product family of storage subsystems with room for up to a dozen SFF hard drives.

"For the mid-market, storage often about both space and speed," says Greg Schulz, Founder of the StorageIO consultancy. "Infortrend is a part of an industry trends is in using Small Form Factor hard drives. Large Form Factor hard drives with one and two terabyte capacities are still good for when you're going for raw capacity, but SFF drives let you put more drives in the same enclosure, or into a smaller enclosure. For SMBs, these can let you buy more capacity for the same price and performance."

According to Infortrend, the company was the first storage vendor worldwide to launch SFF RAID systems featuring 2.5-inch disk drives, in 2007.

The new the EonStor DS B12 storage systems offer three choices for connectivity: 6GB/second Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS), for use in direct-attached storage (DAS); and 1GbE iSCSI and 6Gb/second Fibre Channel (FC) host connectivity for use in SAN deployments.

The EonStor DS B12 family uses standard SFF SATA hard drives. "You can buy drives with anywhere from 73 to 500GB capacity, from our qualified list of vendors," says Harry Hoang, Director, Technical Services, Infortrend.

For greater capacity, the EonStor DS SFF models can be expanded by connecting to LFF and SFF expansion enclosures, and also allows mixing both SAS hard drives, which offer higher performance, and SATA hard drives, which offer higher capacity.

"We see people buying these for use with SQL, and for small businesses wanting to support virtualized computer environments like VMware and Citrix," says Hoang.

According to Infortrend, these new models offer up to 50% greater performance and scalability compared to its previous small-form-factor models, and compared to the company's EonStor DS LFF models, use up to 40% less power. "We offer spin-down-when-idle, and use the new 80+ percent certified power supplies," says Hoang. "The new SFF models are ideally suited to help SMBs increase productivity within their existing budget and space resources."

The EonStor DS B12 family offers data protection features, supporting storage-based snapshot and volume copy/mirror, to help ensure high availability for mission-critical applications. According to the company, using the wizard-based management tools, "Users can create differential and full copies of critical data sets and leverage these to carry out quick-service restarts should the storage be damaged by logical or physical errors."

MSRP for Infortrend's new EonStor DS B12 storage systems starts at around $4,500 for a 12-bay SFF subsystem without drives.