Maynard, Massachusetts-based IPL Systems Inc has made a series of new product and marketing announcements including the addition of ESP RAIDTower to its ESP Tower Series. The company claims it’s the first storage product to offer high-performance RAID 5, with intelligent read and write cache in a single subsystem for the AS/400, open systems, and pc-based server markets. The product gives high-performance RAID 5 across multiple CPU architectures, including RS/6000, Novell Inc NetWare, and the AS/400, including IBM Corp’s new AS/400 Advanced 9406 System Models 300 310 and 320. The ESP-RT is available in rackmount or tower configurations, and current models can be upgraded. Users can choose among three levels of protection: RAID 0 (independent mode), RAID 5, or host-based mirroring. The ESP-RT can be populated with up to eight 1Gb or 2Gb head disk assemblies, providing a maximum capacity of 13.8Gb in RAID 5 mode, or 15.8Gb in RAID 0/independent mode. ESP-RT configurations can include customer-replaceable head disk assemblies and redundant power supplies. An optional dynamic spare enables a failed disk to be replaced immediately and automatically by the disk subsystem. At the heart of the ESP-RT is IPL’s Fast Access Storage Director controller, which features IPL’s dual-mirrored fast write cache and fault-tolerant read-write-through cache – which the company believes to deliver the highest performance of any storage subsystem available. The ESP-RT is available now, starting at $20,400. IPL has also announced plans to offer internal disk storage for IBM’s latest AS/400 processors, including the 9406 Models 300, 310 and 320. IPL’s 7406 strategy includes 1Gb, 2Gb and 4Gb configurations, and promises better price performance than equivalent IBM offerings, claims the company. ESP 7406 evaluation and beta units will ship after the general availability of IBM’s new CPUs. Finally, IPL has signed a development and marketing agreement with MTI Technology Corp to introduce new products, and build marketing and sales strategies to increase penetration in their respective markets – for MTI, the cross-system computing environment, for IPL, the AS/400, RS/6000 and NetWare environments.
