Winchester Systems(R) Begins Shipping Auto-Tiering Hybrid Flash Storage Arrays

BILLERICA, MA--(Marketwired - May 20, 2014) -  Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data-storage infrastructure provider to Military and Commercial Systems Integrators and Service/Solution Providers, today announced it has upgraded its entire FlashDisk line of storage systems. The new FlashDisk FX adds "Hybrid" Flash capability -- seamlessly combining Flash-based SSD performance with the economical capacity of magnetic disk drives -- and supports up to 16 host ports, the most in its class, and over 2 Petabytes of capacity using 360 six-terabyte disk drives.

FlashDisk FX Hybrid Flash support is enabled using Automated Tiered-Storage Pools, grouping SSD and HDD drive types into two tiers within a virtualized storage pool. FlashDisk controllers send write transactions to blocks in the higher-performing tier, and monitor the access frequency and age of each data block, automatically migrating "hot" or "cold" data to the appropriate tier. Storage tiers can also be defined based on other drive types or on different RAID levels.

Each FlashDisk FX controller includes eight built-in 1-Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) iSCSI ports, with additional 1GbE or 10GbE iSCSI, 8Gb or 16Gb Fibre Channel, or 6Gb SAS host ports provided via a hardware module that plugs onto the controller motherboard. This modular design makes it easy to tailor FlashDisk FX to suit specific customer-solution requirements. It also enables easy field upgrades: customers can purchase a FlashDisk FX system with 1GbE iSCSI ports, for example, and later upgrade it to 10GbE iSCSI or 16Gb Fibre Channel (FC) when they need faster connectivity.

New FlashDisk FX models include:

• FlashDisk FX-2U12: up to twelve 3.5-inch disks per drive shelf, delivering up to 5,000 MB/second and over 1 million IOPS.
• FlashDisk FX-3U16: up to sixteen 3.5-inch disks per drive shelf, delivering up to 5,500 MB/second and over 1.2 million IOPS.
• FlashDisk FX-2U24: up to twenty-four 2.5-inch disks per drive shelf, delivering up to 5,200 MB/second and over 1.4 million IOPS.

"For over three decades, Winchester Systems has consistently provided high-value storage for much less than competing products with similar performance, capability and scale," said Ted Gumer, Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Winchester Systems. "Adding Hybrid Flash and Automated Storage Tiers to other must-have enterprise features such as snapshots, thin provisioning, remote replication, and online capacity expansion makes FlashDisk FX as compelling as ever to systems integrators, solution providers, and end-user customers."

The new FlashDisk FX systems are available immediately. Winchester Systems also offers storage-infrastructure consulting, on-site installation and service spares, and 24x7 product service and support for FlashDisk worldwide.

For more information about FlashDisk FX storage, see the FlashDisk FX-2U12, FlashDisk FX-3U16 and FlashDisk FX-2U24 data sheets. To start designing a purpose-built infrastructure for your workload challenge, contact a Winchester Systems storage expert.

About Winchester Systems Inc.
Founded in 1981, Winchester Systems provides purpose-built, dependable, high-performance server and storage systems -- and expertise -- to Commercial, Federal-government and military clients. Winchester Systems I/O-performance and ruggedized-system experts collaborate with each client's integration team to tailor an IT infrastructure, including storage and servers, to best fit their customer's environmental and workload requirements. Storage offerings include FlashDisk^® RAID Disk Arrays in Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) configurations, and FlashNAS unified Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems. FlashServer Intel-based servers include standard and high availability configurations. For more information visit: www.winsys.com.