BusinessWire
March 07, 2006 06:09 AM US Pacific Timezone

iQstor Announces General Availability of the J2880 SBOD; One of the Industry's First Affordable Modular 4Gb FC Switched JBODs

NEWBURY PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 7, 2006--iQstor Networks, Inc., a leading developer of intelligent and integrated Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions, announced today the introduction and general availability of the J2880, an easy-to-implement and easy-to-use modular 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) Switched JBOD (SBOD) disk expansion enclosure.

iQstor's J2880 SBOD cost-effectively augments network storage solutions aimed at a wide range of applications in media & entertainment, financial services, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, legal, digital imaging, internet delivery, enterprise database and education. The J2880 delivers significant performance and capacity improvements for companies seeking to implement storage solutions that are easy to deploy and manage, while providing an upgrade path to enable a highly intelligent tiered-storage infrastructure with high performance FC and low cost SATA II disk drives mixed in the same enclosure.

"The modular J2880 SBOD enables IT administrators to quickly and cost-effectively optimize and scale their storage solutions for changing application and network environments, allowing enterprises to grow their network storage as the need arises, from a small expansion system to augment their existing RAID subsystem to very large tiered-storage SAN systems," said Jason Lo, president and CEO of iQstor Networks. "For larger SAN implementations, instead of relying on traditional FC drive loops, the J2880 SBOD deploys an advanced FC switch technology to deliver a point-to-point switch connection between each drive and the storage controllers. This technology significantly increases total system availability, reliability and serviceability in addition to reducing system latency and improving overall performance."

Easily connected to RAID subsystems, each 19" 3U rack mountable J2880, scales to 2.2TB with 15 x 146GB 4Gb FC disk drives or 7.5TB with 15 x 500GB SATA disk drives, allowing the creation of very large tiered-storage SAN systems as needs arise. With fully redundant, hot swappable components such as disk drives, power supplies, cooling modules and FC hubs, the J2880 ensures reliability and high availability. The J2880 supports the latest FC 4Gb interconnect in switched dual loops, is backward compatible to 2Gb FC-AL, provides redundancy and delivers performance of up to 800MB/sec and can be configured with either FC or SATA II disk drives. What's more, the J2880 SBOD affords comprehensive storage management and diagnostics services to increase storage efficiencies, providing detailed information about failed components through simplified troubleshooting and detailed event management. The J2880 SBOD supports in-band management when used with a SES-compatible RAID controller or an HBA.

"The J2880 SBOD is an enabling storage building block that meets the performance and capacity needs of high growth environments requiring cost effective storage solutions. Incorporating the FC switching technology, the J2880 will be equally at home supporting high bandwidth, low latency performance sensitive applications with 4Gb FC disks while concurrently supporting capacity intensive near-line storage applications with SATA disks. iQstor is part of an early adopter group of suppliers to leverage 4Gb FC for performance as well as the aggregation and consolidation of multiple servers to share storage resources including bandwidth and capacity," added Greg Schulz, Founder and Sr. Analyst of the StorageIO Group. "4Gb FC benefits users beyond its bandwidth capabilities by enabling more servers to aggregate and connect to a storage port as well as lowering latency and response time. The new bar for FC based storage systems are 4Gb along with functionality including RAID 6 for data integrity when using large capacity FC, SAS, and SATA near-line type disk drives."

"The J2880 SBOD modular enclosure delivers on our promise of offering investment protection, cost-effectiveness and significant performance improvements to small and large businesses seeking storage solutions that are easy to deploy, easy to manage and easy to scale," concluded Lo.

About iQstor Networks, Inc.

A privately held company based in Newbury Park, CA, iQstor is a leader in the innovative design and delivery of storage solutions with embedded enterprise level functionality to channel partners worldwide. Its storage solutions include Fibre Channel, iSCSI and SATA intelligent storage systems and expansion enclosures, policy based storage management, data services software, professional services, support and training. For more information on iQstor, visit the company's web site at www.iqstor.com