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Mylex Announces DACFF RAID Controller

Mylex Corp. (Fremont, Calif., www.mylex.com) today announced the DACFF, their new Fibre Channel RAID controller. Mylex says the controller, which provides an end-to-end Fibre Channel interface between the host computer and the disk drives, delivers almost four times the I/O performance of traditional Ultra SCSI controllers.

"The DACFF RAID controller serves as an essential building block for clustering and Storage Area Network (SAN) environments," says David Hill, senior storage industry analyst at Aberdeen Group (Boston). "End-to-end Fibre Channel connectivity allows system architects to create extremely scalable, high-performance storage systems."

With dual active, automatic failover/failback host cluster support via two copper Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) channels, the DACFF enables flexible configuration and redundant connections for high-availability applications. In addition to supporting automatic failover/failback, DACFF provides support for four other critical clustered storage capabilities, including active-active operation, mirrored write caching, scalable I/O performance and scaleable I/O capacity.

The DACFF's Fibre Channel disk drive connectivity delivers drive data transfer rates of over 100 MB/sec per Fibre Channel loop. The DACFF delivers up to 190 MB/sec performance for sustained sequential RAID 5 reads and over 140 MB/sec performance in sustained sequential RAID 5 writes.

The DACFF's architecture provides a separate memory for cache, cache look-up tables, and the CPU instruction store. The DACFF hardware supports dual active configurations for better performance and fault-tolerance.

The DACFF supports drive connectivity via four Fibre Channel Loops. Each controller supports up to 500 drives, allowing over 25 terabytes capacity per controller. By utilizing multiple DACFFs, customers can build large LAN-based OLTP and OLAP systems, as well as bandwidth intensive applications such as video and broadcasting.

Another feature of DACFF is Mylex's GAM and WAM (Global Array Manager and Web Array Manager), which enable the RAID system to be configured, maintained and monitored remotely over the Internet or corporate Intranet. --Brian Ploskina, Assistant Editor

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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