First FC-AL-2 Enclosure Announced by UK Storage Company

January 31, 2000 -- Nexsan Technologies today announced the first member of its new InfiniSANT family, which supports four double-speed (2 Gigabit) Fibre Channel loops for a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 1,600 megabytes per second. "FC-AL-2 disc drives from Seagate and IBM are starting to hit the streets," observed Managing Director Martin Boddy, "and we thought it was important to come to market quickly with a FC-AL-2 chassis, primarily aimed at developers but with application to power users world-wide." Many types of management silicon for FC-AL-2 will not be shipping until 3Q2000, but it is now possible to create the first FC-AL-2 JBOD chassis using a simplified, unique approach pioneered by Nexsan engineers.

Once the appropriate silicon becomes available, the InfiniSANT 8F2 will be upgraded to support SCSI Enclosure Services (SES), and loop re-clocking circuitry. By restricting the external cable length to 20m (from the usual 30m), and by requiring at least 4 disc drives to be installed in the unit, re-clocking is not seen to be necessary. "In practice," notes Technical Director Gary Watson, "developers don't use 30 meter cables in their labs so the restrictions won't cause too much trouble. We've also made the unit more flexible by arranging the drives in four independent loops, with four dual-ported drives per loop."

The InfiniSANT 8F2 is based on the same chassis as Nexsan's successful Xraid product family, and includes two 300 watt n+1 power supplies, innovative drive carriers, a unique auto-venting front door which seals off empty drive bays, and numerous other technical innovations.

Pricing of the InfiniSANT 8F2 has not been announced, but Watson suggests "developers consider the barter system for early units. Give me something cool for my lab, and you can have a disc chassis!"

Founded in 1998, and operational since April 1999, Nexsan Technologies, Ltd. is a OEM manufacturer of high availability, mission-critical data storage solutions for the worldwide marketplace.