Winchester Systems Launches FlashDisk AFA -- High Performance All Flash Array

BILLERICA, MA--(Marketwired - Sep 18, 2015) - Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data storage solutions provider, today announced that it introduced an All Flash Array, using 2.5" SSDs, called FlashDisk AFA. The product is a flash-optimized, 14^th generation product with a 20-year field-proven architecture and tight embedded kernel. It provides a high performance SSD solution that competes on a dollar per gigabyte basis without the need for expensive and complex appliances that rely on compression and de-duplication in large configurations to reduce costs. The company describes this approach as "Simply Faster."

FlashDisk AFA is designed to provide 487,000 IOPS continuous performance for random access applications in an external storage unit with cost per IOPS in the $0.25/IOPS range. More impressively, FlashDisk AFA delivers capacity in the $2/GB range in native format without compression or de-duplication.

"The FlashDisk AFA is focused on continuous high performance and delivers 2 to 8 times the IOPS per dollar than appliance solutions that need compression and de-duplication appliances to make them viable," according to Mr. Joe Sanzio, the company's chief technology officer. "Without the expensive appliance, FlashDisk AFA offers a substantially lower initial cost of entry for SMBs and departmental environments," he explained, "while still providing low incremental expansion costs since there is no expensive and risky software." Sanzio, a 20-year veteran designer, summarized succinctly, "FlashDisk AFA is simple and it is faster -- and it is less expensive and more reliable too."

The FlashDisk AFA base unit holds up to (24) 2.5" SSDs with capacities ranging from 400 GB to 3.84 TB each to provide 9.6 TB to 92 TB in the base unit. For higher capacity, each FlashDisk AFA offers up to two expansion shelves bringing total capacity to 276 TB per system with 72 SSDs. Multiple FlashDisk AFA systems can easily be managed from a single pane of glass using the embedded GUI, FlashDisk Global Manager 3, which can also manage the company's traditional FlashDisk RAID Disk Arrays using standard HDDs.

FlashDisk AFA supports SSDs with a variety of endurance capabilities to optimize cost to I/O intensity. SSD endurance is measured in "Drive Writes per Day" or DWD. SSDs offered include units that start with 0.5 DWD for light read and write intensity and scale up to 30 DWD for the most intense database applications and "hot spots" found in a variety of data intensive applications. To make best use of this variety of cost and performance tradeoffs, FlashDisk AFA support tiered storage for up to four separate tiers of data so that the IT manager can easily optimize cost, performance and endurance.

The systems operations in multiple environments including Fibre Channel 8 Gb or 16 Gb as a SAN or on a LAN with 1 GbE, 10 GbE or 40 GbE. It is also available with 12 Gb SAS ports to create a switchless "SAN-In-A-Box" with direct SAS connections.

Prices for FlashDisk AFA, all flash arrays, starts at under $30,000. Products are available now and delivery is 2-3 weeks.

About Winchester Systems Inc.
Winchester Systems provides "Purpose-Built" data storage solutions for commercial and military applications that include servers, networking, storage and software combined with professional integration services. Storage offerings include FlashDisk RAID Disk Arrays and FlashDisk All Flash Arrays in Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) configurations. These tiered storage solutions offer a wide variety of HDD and SSD disks for Fibre Channel, SAS and iSCSI environments. FlashServer Intel-based servers include standard and high availability configurations. For more information visit: www.winsys.com.