ATTO Technology has introduced a new feature of the ATTO FibreBridge 7500, making it possible to add Fibre Channel functionality to direct attach SAS RAID arrays, alleviating data transfer bottlenecks and improving performance.
The ATTO 7500 Storage Controller converts direct attach SAS RAID, JBOD or JBOF storage to Fibre Channel SAN technology and enables all servers to have shared access to all storage at a high rate of speed with very low latency— up to 6.4 GB/s throughput or 1.47M 4K IOPS per controller pair, which is critical in virtualized environments. Additionally, adding SAN technology with the ATTO 7500 Storage Controller eliminates the need for data migration when upgrading existing storage, meaning there’s no risk of data loss or corruption.
“ATTO has always strived to solve problems related to performance and latency", said Jim U'Ren, Product Manager at ATTO Technology, Inc. "As IT managers built their virtualization strategy, their storage architecture became a bottleneck as they had equipment failures or performed live migrations and vMotions between physical nodes. ATTO's FibreBridge 7500 now gives them the ability to enhance ROI on existing storage and servers while increasing performance and removing bottlenecks without the need for new storage hardware, servers or expensive data migration. "
Faster data transfer without piecemeal expansion
ATTO’s FibreBridge 7500 Storage Controller will improve underlying storage performance and architecture to reduce CPU utilization by data transfer activities such as VMware vMotion or live migration of data between physical servers, all without requiring any downtime.
Compared with other devices, ATTO's FibreBridge 7500 Storage Controller is dramatically faster for transferring information between physical servers. In real work application testing, it took approximately 30 hours to transfer two running virtual machines (VMs), about 400 GB of data, using SATA connected devices; SAS devices took about six hours to move the VMs. Connecting the ATTO FibreBridge 7500 in front of the direct attached RAID storage, it took less than four minutes to complete the VM transfer.
“One of the applications that benefit from adding this technology is in virtual environments,” stated Jeff Okonczak, director of customer engineering at ATTO. “The ATTO 7500 provides greater redundancy by allowing a rapid reassignment of VMs in the event of a host or storage failure while allowing arrays to be added without having to shut down the host. The 7500 also provides the benefit of decoupling servers from storage so IT administrators can scale up storage as required without also needing to scale up CPU.”
New hosts or technologies, including Software Defined Storage, can be added without disruption while extending the lifespan of existing storage solutions: By load balancing and increasing the efficiency of the backbone as a whole, storage arrays that might have been upgraded or replaced to keep up with storage demands can remain in use for longer than expected.
Converting to 16Gb Fibre Channel with 12 Gb SAS support using the ATTO FibreBridge 7500 starts at $16,000 MSRP with no additional licensing costs. Total cost to upgrade existing storage depends on how many servers require access to storage. Other methods to upgrade storage include swapping existing controllers or ripping and replacing storage with more expensive equipment that has substantial data migration costs, including system downtime and lost productivity.
