Company claims industry first with external controllers Hoping to snag cost-conscious customers, Xiotech today introduced a new storage array featuring a distributed architecture the company believes eliminates the need to purchase a second array for disaster-recovery scenarios.Dubbed Magnitude 3D, the new array’s internal capacity is accessed by a number of controllers that reside outside the array. This approach is entirely unique to the industry and is the definition of modular storage, said Rebel Brown, executive vice president of marketing at Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Xiotech.“We call this a clustered storage architecture,” Brown said. “Instead of putting the controllers in the box, a bunch of nodes can be created.” Brown explained that with the use of nodes, a storage administrator can access the capacity within the array from any controller connected via FC (Fibre Channel) at a distance no greater than 300 meters — the practical limit of FC technology. By placing the controllers in various locations, Brown said, there isn’t a single point of failure.Brown added the company has applied this architecture to its existing line of Magnitude arrays and that it was designed to provide faster and more efficient fail-over and save customers money.“With the architecture, we can do intercontroller fail-over and transfer workload automatically if a controller fails,” Brown said. “If a customer was using a replication approach to move storage over after a failure, it might take two days. “For the cost of one chassis with two internal controllers, customers can get one 3D system. That means they only have to buy one array, not two,” Brown added. The new array can be managed with an updated version of Xiotech’s existing management software that includes an improved graphical user interface and a Web-based front end.Brown said future Magnitude arrays would support serial ATA drives and would use iSCSI as an interconnect. Other enhancements to the clustering architecture would include the ability to create pools of storage across geographical locations. Technology Industry