"We designed the SANArray FFx-2 to support heterogeneous SAN environments and to offer superior performance, availability and management features," said Suresh Panikar, director of product marketing for OEM RAID and storage systems at IBM. "The SANArray FFx-2 brings high performance and maximum data availability to SAN and clustered environments."

The SANArray FFx-2 provides dual 2 Gb/s fabric ports, which automatically adjust their modes of operation to the SAN topology—point-to-point or arbitrated loop. The controller’s autonegotiate feature enables each port to operate at the maximum speed supported by the user’s environment. Dual 2 Gb/s disk-side channels provide high performance, failure-resilient paths to a pool of storage. Both fabric and disk channels optimize performance by supporting full duplex operation. With this capability, the controller can send and receive data from the fabric and the storage simultaneously on all four ports.

The SANArray FFx-2 raises the performance bar for midrange RAID controllers. Two controllers configured as an active-active controller pair for fault tolerant operation can process up to 100,000 I/Os per second (IOPS), a more than fivefold increase over its predecessor. In bandwidth-intensive operations, an active-active pair can feed data to SAN nodes at a sustained rate of 350 MB/s, more than 80% faster than the SANArray FFx, and process RAID 5 write operations at 270 MB/s. Additionally, system administrators can connect up to 124 drives for each controller.

The SANArray FFx-2 was designed to meet the demanding availability and serviceability requirements of SAN environments. Dual loops offer independent paths to all drives, with transparent failover/failback for improved fault tolerance. Optional PATHPilot^TM software is designed to automatically balance workloads across multiple paths through a fabric while providing continuous accessibility to data if a fabric component goes down. Additional features include SANmapping^TM and cache coherency, which enable the SANArray FFx-2 to be configured for operation in heterogeneous SAN environments and to provide consistent data through either controller in a dual-active configuration. The controller’s host clustering support helps maximize data protection.

All data buses on the SANArray FFx-2 are parity-protected, and its control store and user data cache memory are ECC-protected. Caches are synchronized to guarantee that write operations are successful and complete in the presence of controller failure.

SANArray Manager software enables the RAID system to be configured, managed and monitored remotely from anywhere in the world. Its advanced RAIDAssist feature eliminates difficulty in setting up disk arrays by enabling interactive selection of the optimum balance of storage capacity, data availability and I/O performance. The controller provides full RAID level 0, 1, 0+1, 3, 5, 10, 30, 50 and JBOD configuration capabilities.

The SANArray FFx-2 is available to storage OEMs.