AMHERST, NY — ATTO Technology (www.attotech.com), a manufacturer specializing in storage and network connectivity products for data-intensive computing, has announced a new feature for its FibreBridge 7500, making it possible to add Fibre Channel functionality to direct attach SAS RAID arrays, alleviating data transfer bottlenecks and improving performance.
The ATTO 7500 storage controller converts direct attach SAS RAID, JBOD or JBOF storage to Fibre Channel SAN technology and enables all servers to have shared access to all storage at a high rate of speed with very low latency— up to 6.4 GB/s throughput or 1.47M 4K IOPS per controller pair. Additionally, adding SAN technology with the 7500 storage controller eliminates the need for data migration when upgrading existing storage, meaning there’s no risk of data loss or corruption.
“ATTO has always strived to solve problems related to performance and latency", says Jim U'Ren, product manager at ATTO Technology. "As IT managers built their virtualization strategy, their storage architecture became a bottleneck as they had equipment failures or performed live migrations and vMotions between physical nodes. ATTO's FibreBridge 7500 now gives them the ability to enhance ROI on existing storage and servers while increasing performance and removing bottlenecks without the need for new storage hardware, servers or expensive data migration. "
The FibreBridge 7500 will improve underlying storage performance and architecture to reduce CPU utilization by data transfer activities such as VMware vMotion or live migration of data between physical servers, all without requiring any downtime. Compared with other devices, the FibreBridge 7500 is dramatically faster for transferring information between physical servers. In real work application testing, it took approximately 30 hours to transfer two running virtual machines (VMs), about 400GB of data, using SATA connected devices; SAS devices took about six hours to move the VMs. Connecting the ATTO FibreBridge 7500 in front of the direct attached RAID storage, it took less than four minutes to complete the VM transfer.
New hosts or technologies, including Software Defined Storage, can be added without disruption while extending the lifespan of existing storage solutions: By load balancing and increasing the efficiency of the backbone as a whole, storage arrays that might have been upgraded or replaced to keep up with storage demands can remain in use for longer than expected.
Converting to 16Gb Fibre Channel with 12Gb SAS support using the FibreBridge 7500 starts at $16,000 with no additional licensing costs. Total cost to upgrade existing storage depends on how many servers require access to storage.