ATTO Technology added a new feature to 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 1.47 million 4K IOPS per controller pair, which is critical in virtualized environments.
Additionally, adding SAN technology with the ATTO 7500 Storage Controller eliminates the need for data migration when upgrading existing storage, meaning there’s no risk of data loss or corruption.
ATTO’s FibreBridge 7500 Storage Controller 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, without requiring any downtime.
ATTO Storage Controller products connect enterprise class Fibre Channel networks to SAS/SATA storage with less than four microseconds of latency and a lower total cost of ownership compared to dedicated flash or hybrid storage products. They provide an affordable way to build own storage system using off-the-shelf SAS JBOD storage and SAS/SATA HDD, SSD flash drives and SAS/SATA tape devices.
With support for up to 240 disk drives, ATTO Storage Controllers can cost effectively scale up to a massive amounts of storage. Its superior I/O caceleration offers up to one million IOPS; aggregate up to 240 drives; Drive Map Director reduces storage downtime and maintenance costs; top of rack controller adds intelligence, flexibility to JBOD storage; dedicated controllers that require no operating system or maintenance, and standard 19-inch rackmount form factor.
Compared with other devices, ATTO’s FibreBridge 7500 Storage Controller 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 400 GB 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 took less than four minutes to complete the VM transfer.
“One of the applications that benefit from adding this technology is in virtual environments,” stated Jeff Okonczak, director of customer engineering at ATTO. “The ATTO 7500 provides greater redundancy by allowing a rapid reassignment of VMs in the event of a host or storage failure while allowing arrays to be added without having to shut down the host. The 7500 also provides the benefit of decoupling servers from storage so IT administrators can scale up storage as required without also needing to scale up CPU.”
The ATTO FibreBridge offers versatility, connectivity and enhanced device management capabilities
by virtualizing SAS storage devices for incorporation into Fibre Channel SAN infrastructures.
Scaling from workgroup to enterprise implementations, it provides enterprise-class management
and monitoring, coupled with faster time-to-data and improved overall data throughput.
FibreBridge allows users to build their own storage with lower cost SAS JBOD enclosures and
SSD/HDD devices for a lower capital investment compared to Flash or Hybrid storage arrays.
Both the 6500 and 7500 use Fibre Channel’s ability to transfer data between remote sites
with minimal latency for stretch cluster installations that enable disaster recovery and downtime
avoidance.
FibreBridge 7500 is compatible with JBODs, hard disk drives, solid state drives, tape libraries,
RAID Arrays and RAID controllers; patented Drive Map Director that brings down operating expenses by eliminating manual mapping of LUNs and the need to remap LUNs if a drive shelf is removed for maintenance or failure. It also features Advanced Data Streaming (ADS) that improves backup time to tape or disks, reducing backup windows and enabling more concurrent streams of data.
The Virtual Device Response (VDR) technology enables devices to queue and execute commands on behalf of busy or unresponsive tape storage, reducing the number of failed or incomplete backups
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.
