SAN by VMETRO

Reliability:
~ Xi disks are enterprise class disks designed to operate over a broader temperature range
~ operating 24-hours/day, 365-days/year with a published MTBF of 1.2 million hours
~ this compares to ATA or IDE personal class storage devices used by other recording system
~ that have a lower temperature range operating only 8-hours/day, 300 days/year with a published MTBF of only 600K hours
~ Xi disks are the most reliable disk storage available today

Cabling:
~ Xi cable is lightweight and can operate over a distance of 1000 feet
~ compare that with SCSI parallel cable that is bulky and can only go a few feet
~ Xi allows the storage to be local in the chassis or remotely as the situation requires
~ in addition, the Xi arbitrated loop allows over 100 drives to be easily attached to a single Xi port
~ that is well beyond the capabilities of parallel disk systems that must basically be in the same chassis with the recorder hardware

Connectivity:
~ each Xi disk is dual ported with independent disk controllers and both ports can be simultaneously used
~ this allows the recorder system to utilize one port while the analysis system accesses the data on the other
~ and because the number of drives on Xi ports is large, it is very easy to implement a queue of disk groups
~ allowing analysis to occur on one disk group with no interference to the recorder storing data on a different disk group
~ it is also possible for many recorders to share a single disk group where limited space is a primary consideration
~ and finally implementing a Xi switched environment allows unlimited flexibility in the size and number of connected storage devices,
~ recorders, playback units operating simultaneously with display and analysis workstations

Performance:
~ each disk can be up to 300GB capacity and delivers 50MB/s of performance on the inner most tracks of drive
~ striping four disks matches the 200MB/s Xi performance per port and
~ striping across the dual Xi interface of the VORTEX recording engines provides 400MB/s of raw disk performance per recording engine

~ Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. chose the SANbric
~ for their Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle-Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAV-SAR) program