Features - Storage Innovations:

CHAPARRAL LAUNCHES RIO eXp SERIAL ATA STORAGE SOLUTION

Chaparral Network Storage Inc, a developer of specialized appliances that deliver high-performance access to data in rich media environments, announced availability of the newest addition to its advanced RAID storage family, the RIO eXp Storage Solution.

The RIO eXp RAID Storage System, which incorporates serial ATA technology, is designed to reduce the complexity and risk of SAN deployment in heterogeneous, high performance environments. It is designed for the mid-range to enterprise business that requires high performance capability in its IT environment. With unprecedented seamless scalability from 4TB to 62TB, a single management GUI, fully fault tolerant controller with hot swappable components, and user selectable RAID configurations, the RIO eXp offers an enterprise class industry benchmark for high bandwidth applications such as video retention storage and geophysical image collection.

"Today's disk drive technology offers the potential of tremendous storage capacities. To effectively manage these larger storage capacities, the RIO eXp offers the ability to partition disk arrays into multiple, variable size disk partitions. These capabilities, coupled with RIO eXp's high performance, offer a storage solution with enterprise class features at an affordable price point," said Ron Macleod, UK sales director for Chaparral.

A key advantage of the RIO eXp Storage Subsystem architecture in the SATA environment is its flexible IO design; RIO eXp is agnostic to the backend drive technology. Upcoming releases will support FC and SATA drives in the same storage system to provide complete primary and secondary storage in a single storage solution. Chaparral is deploying true, native serial ATA drives in the RIO eXp product, bypassing the parallel ATA drive implementation that most other vendors offer. This is believed to be the highest protection available in any ATA system on the market today.

"The introduction of the RIO eXp demonstrates our ongoing commitment to deliver market leading solutions to our customers and partners," stated Cooper Cowart, vice president of marketing at Chaparral. "The RIO eXp leads the way in enterprise-class disk storage solutions by providing unparalleled performance today, with an upgrade path for future expansion including the full integration of serial ATA and fibre channel into a single subsystem."

The RIVA Storage Solution is available from Chaparral distributors, system integrators and value-added resellers. The RIO eXp configurations will store 4TB -- 32TB for a RIO eXp R3200 -- and 16TB -- 62TB for a RIO eXp R3400.