As well as the new machines that it launched in the US last Friday (CI No 1,501), Dell Computer Corp, Austin, Texas is making its server systems more attractive and competitive against such as the Compaq SystemPro by introducing its own-designed disk subsystem for applications such as software development, computer-aided design and other graphical applications that need good disk performance and data reliability. According to Dell, the Drive Array gives substantial performance gains over ESDI and SCSI hard disk drive and cache controllers by using techniques such as data striping, data rendundancy and simultaneous seeks across multiple drives. Data striping transfers data from multiple disks simultaneously; data rendundancy enables data to be recovered intact after a disk failure; and simultaneous seeks allows concurrent access to files on different disks. The product is a 32-bit EISA bus master controller card using Intel Corp’s 80960 RISC processor, and can support up to eight drives on the new 80486 systems, the limitation being power supply capacity. This gives an initial maximum storage capacity of 1.6Gb using 200Mb disks, but larger drives sizes can be supported when they become available. AT and SCSI adaptors are available, and the subsystem supports MS-DOS, OS/2, NetWare, Dell and SCO Unix and Banyan Vines operating systems. It will be available in the fourth quarter, when pricing will be announced.
