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Home >> News & Events|Press Releases >> Press Releases Winchester Systems' FlashDisk® OpenRAID Storage Systems Offers Seagate's Award-Winning Barracuda 50-Gbyte Disk Drives WOBURN, MA (January 15, 2000) Winchester Systems Inc., a manufacturer of external, high-speed storage systems for open systems servers, has raised the bar on storage capacity and performance by announcing immediate availability of FlashDisk® OpenRAID storage with Seagate's (NYSE: SEG) Barrarcuda 50 Ultra 2SCSI, LVD (low-voltage differential) disk drives. (Like the name suggests, each Barracuda 50 drive has 50 Gbytes of storage). Now, even the smallest FlashDisk OpenRAID storage system can have the storage capacity equivalent to a stack of memos reaching more than three times the height of the Eiffel Tower. Joel Leider, CEO of Winchester Systems, says: “Seagate's Barracuda 50-Gbyte disk drive offers the reliability, capacity, and performance our FlashDisk customers need for highly I/O-intensive, storage applications that range from processing 1,000s of Oracle-based transactions around the clock to accessing massive, multimedia files without any network delays.” In product review comparisons with similar disk drives, Seagate's Barracuda 50 has scored some impressive gains, according to two computer publications. Computer Reseller News picked the Barracuda 50 as the top, high-capacity disk drive. The publication writes….“it was a no-brainer handing Seagate the Editors' Choice Award. For those who recall when 50 Mbytes was astonishing, this drive will leave you speechless.” This drive made Winmag.com's Win List, garnering this conclusion: “In our battery of benchmark tests, the Barracuda 50 was an impressive swimmer indeed.” With 11 platters and 22 heads whipping around, the Barracuda 50 LVD performs on the average about 7,200 rpm in a low-voltage differential mode for Ultra 2SCSI. The Barracuda 50's Ultra 2SCSI implementation leverages the FlashDisk's massively parallel RAID architecture with an end-to-end transfer rate of up to 80 Mbytes per second from host to drives on a SCSI adapter. Leider says, “This drive adds 37 percent more capacity while maintaining the I/O performance of previous high-speed FlashDisk models. Winchester Systems can still guarantee that FlashDisk is the “world's fastest SCSI RAID storage system,” as confirmed in independent products reviews by Performance Computing and Server/Workstation Expert.” The Barracuda 50 drive is contained in a 3.5-inch form-factor with a 1.6-inch height, and is built on areal density that is above 4.5 Gbytes. Leider says, “The number of platters and heads, along with the high internal transfer rate, makes this drive a better performer than other drives we evaluated. The new drive easily fits into the FlashDisk 36-Gbyte, 3.5-inch disk drive slot so customers can easily upgrade to the Barracuda 50 without replacing the basic system.” FlashDisk OpenRAID delivers 65 Mbytes per second of actual sustained throughput today with Ultra 2SCSI adapters on Windows NT, Netware, Linux, SCO, Banyan Vines, MacOS, DEC UNIX and OpenVMS. Servers that run HP/UX, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and OS/2 Warp, SGI IRIX and BSD UNIX currently support FlashDisk at 40 Mbytes per second Ultra2 SCSI speed, but 80 Mbytes per second support is expected soon. FlashDisk OpenRAID - A Unique Plug-and-Play Storage Solution FlashDisk OpenRAID is a hardware, plug-and-play storage solution, which emulates standard Ultra2 SCSI disks to the host. This eliminates proprietary host software, RAID managers and Y2K worries. It supports hardware RAID 1, 3, 5 and 1+0 data protection. All models include call-for-help hardware paging. Up to 128 arrays can be managed from one user console by Ethernet with Telnet, SNMP, and network management software such as HP OpenView or IBM NetView. Three FlashDisk models with the Barracuda 50 drives are available for immediate delivery:
Both FlashDisk Tabletop and Pedestal models deliver 9,779 I/Os per second and 65 Mbytes per second sustained data transfer. Availability and Pricing The FlashDisk Tabletop with 5, 50-Gbyte disk drives, which totals 250 Gbytes, sells for about $36,000. Both the FlashDisk Pedestal and the FlashDisk Data Center with 8, 50-Gbyte disk drives, which totals 400 Gbytes, sell for about $68,000. All FlashDisk models with 50-Gbyte disk drives are available immediately directly from Winchester Systems, Inc. About Winchester Systems Inc. Founded in 1981, Winchester Systems Inc. is dedicated to providing technically superior disk and tape solutions to a diverse clientele worldwide, including many Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies. Since 1989, customers such as Honeywell, MCI, Motorola, Boeing, Tropicana, Siemens, Ceridian, Deloitte & Touche and the U.S. Coast Guard have deployed Winchester Systems' FlashDisk solutions with great success. Many customers report that FlashDisk accelerates their disk-intensive applications by 100 percent to 500 percent. FlashDisk massively parallel cached RAID solutions deliver fast, simple, reliable and cost-effective access to server data. Winchester Systems pioneered the concept of “plug-and-play” OpenRAID storage by adhering to strict industry SCSI standards without relying on proprietary host software, drivers, or storage managers. Winchester Systems' FlashDisk competes with RAID storage systems from EMC (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HP), and Sun (NASDAQ: SUNW). More information is available at http://www.winsys.com, or by calling 800-325-3700. Winchester Systems, FlashDisk and OpenRAID are trademarks or registered trademarks of Winchester Systems All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.
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