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High Performance Fibre Channel Disk Supports 400 GB Drives
Delivers over 1,500 MB per second - 120,000 IOPS

Burlington, MA. September 12, 2007. Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data storage solutions company, today announced that its ultra high performance, enterprise-class Fibre Channel disk array now supports 400 GB drives bringing the total capacity to 38.4 TB. The array continues to provide RAID 6 dual parity that protects against two concurrent drive failures as well as rebuild failures.

The company's FlashDisk FC-3400 Series disk arrays provide up to 38.4 TB of storage using a base unit with single or redundant RAID controllers and up to five expansion shelves with a total of 96 Fibre Channel disk drives. The latest release incorporates 400 GB capacity drives with 10K rpm rotational speed. The product continues to support both 10K and 15K rpm drives in capacities of 73, 146 and 300 GB for the most demanding applications including database, OLTP, financial, manufacturing, video and real-time data acquisition. The dual controller model with four 4 Gb Fibre Channel ports provides 1,500 MB per second sustained throughput and over 120,000 disk IO operations per second with cache mirroring enabled for controller failover.

"The new 400 GB Fibre Channel disk drive increases total capacity and storage density and reduces cost per gigabyte," according to Mr. Joel Leider, the company's chief executive officer. "Now up to 89.6 TB of very high performance storage fits into a single 42U cabinet," he added.

The FC-3400 Series is intended for large transaction processing applications as well as large sequential applications where the need to increase data protection is critical. RAID 6 provides dual parity to protect against two drive failures and to help ensure that critical disk rebuilds, after a disk drive failure, are successful - especially important with today's large arrays. The company's white paper, "Enterprise RAID 6" (www.winsys.com), shows that RAID 6 dual parity offers 500 to 30,000 times longer MTDL (Mean Time To Data Loss) than RAID 5. RAID 6 parity on FlashDisk is performed with hardware ASICs for high speed to ensure that RAID 6 runs at comparable speed to RAID 5.

According to Mr. Jerry Namery, the company's chief technology officer, "To deliver the highest possible speed in an enterprise class product and the highest possible data protection, we use dedicated hardware ASICs for the compute intensive RAID 6 dual parity calculations and multiple Fibre Channel connections between the redundant controllers to mirror controller cache for potential failover," he explained. "These two hardware innovations are why we can offer both the highest possible speed and the highest possible reliability in the same enterprise class product."

Up to four Fibre Channel hosts can be directly connected to the FlashDisk FC-3400 Series using its unique "SAN-in-a-Box" design, eliminating the need for switches in certain applications.

FlashDisk is also easily configured as RAID 15 and RAID 16 solutions, which offers NSPF (No Single Point of Failure) using two RAID 5 or RAID 6 systems for those with exceptionally high uptime needs.

The FlashDisk FC-3400 models with 400 GB disk drives are available now and start at under $20,000. Delivery is 2-3 weeks ARO.

About Winchester Systems Inc.
Winchester Systems provides network-attached storage, direct-attached storage, tiered-storage and storage area network enterprise data storage solutions. These solutions include high performance iSCSI, SAS, SCSI, SATA and Fibre Channel RAID disk arrays; tape backup devices and other high performance commercial and military grade data storage for mid-range servers including Windows, Windows Clusters, Linux, Linux Clusters, and UNIX. For more information visit Winchester Systems on the web at www.winsys.com.

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