The Terabyte RAID

Mylex's Ultra 160 SCSI-based AcceleRAID 170LP promises aggressive pricing and low profile form factor to support an ISP's high-density servers.

by Wayne Kawamoto [March 27, 2001]

Mylex, an IBM Company and supplier of RAID controllers, announced that it is now shipping one of the first low-profile RAID controllers designed for the new breed of high-density, rackmount servers.

The aggressively priced AcceleRAID 170LP is designed to be easy to configure, manage and use, and offer broad RAID and operating system support.

The 170LP is designed to be suited for use in banks of servers where space is at a premium, such as those used by Internet and storage service providers (ISPs/SSPs). The AcceleRAID 170LP should fit directly into 2U-high servers. And with a riser card, the controller's small form factor may make a good choice for use with 1U-high server applications.

The AcceleRAID 170LP comes standard with Mylex's Global Array Manager (GAM), which enables the RAID system to be configured, managed and monitored remotely from anywhere in the world. According to Mylex, GAM offers the industry's most comprehensive set of RAID management tools, including remote cluster management.

Mylex's RAID EzAssist is a configuration utility that should simplify controller installation.

The company says that its AcceleRAID 170LP offers many performance and scalability features. With an Intel i960RS 100MHz RISC processor, 16MB ECC cache memory and high performance drivers, the controller is optimized to increase overall system throughput.

Also, the AcceleRAID 170LP has been designed to be highly scalable and connect up to 15 external devices for a capacity of 1.08 terabytes. In Windows NT environments, each server in the network may be able to support up to 32 AcceleRAID 170LP controllers. Mylex Online RAID Expansion should allow users to add drives to existing arrays, and re-stripe the data across all the drives.

AcceleRAID 170LP also features the latest in fault-tolerance features. It supports PCI Hot Plug, which lets network administrators replace controllers without powering down the system. Other fault-tolerance features include automatic detection of failed drives, automatic and transparent rebuild of replacement drives, immediate RAID Availability for background initialization, and SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) capable drive support, as well as automatic error recovery and hot drive swapping support.

"We see a real need to offer a solution for smaller servers," said Suresh Panikar, director of product marketing for Mylex. "The AcceleRAID 170LP is ideal for rapidly growing Internet and service provider industries because it requires less board real estate without compromising speed, reliability and uptime."

"We used an HP NetServer LPr to test the AcceleRAID 170LP," said Jim Fruuen, integration manager for Stepford, a San Carlos, California-based ISP. "We never had a RAID option for this type of server before and we believe Mylex's products are an easy sell because of their technology leadership and aggressive price/performance."

Pricing and availability
AcceleRAID 170LP is shipping now. The AcceleRAID 170LP list price starts at $399.

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