CCH Enterprise Solutions has announced the availability of Amdahl`s "Giga-Screamer", the GSS 4900 modular storage system. Dubbed "a ready-made SAN-in-a-box", the GSS 4900 has earned praise from consultants in the UK, where it was first announced late last month, as promising "awesome performance".
The GSS 4900, configured with up to four storage arrays, can cope with up to 240 000 I/Os per second or achieve data rates of well over a Gigabyte a second. In addition, its wide range of configurations allows customers to start small and grow their capacity, performance, and connectivity to huge levels. A capacity of 100GB can be expanded to 64 Terabytes - over 500 times growth, says Albert Teirlinck, product manager at local Amdahl outlet CCH Enterprise Solutions.
The GSS 4900 integrates components from several major partners including servers from Fujitsu, storage arrays from LSI Logic Storage Systems, and I-SAN switches from Brocade Systems, the market leader in SAN switching.
"Storage challenges are overwhelming these days as business systems expand to include customers, suppliers and others in the new e-business world," says Teirlinck. "The GSS 4900 has been designed to help customers cut through these challenges, and to run and grow with the most demanding data requirements."
The design of the GSS 4900 includes its own integrated SAN (storage area network) allowing connectivity to many open systems servers and enabling advanced storage management solutions.
The GSS 4900 combines storage and fibre channel switching equipment in one box, which can be used as the central hub of a SAN - simplifying the challenging task of creating a SAN from scratch.
"Customers are slow to take advantage of fibre channel technology because of the costs and manpower required to carry out the design and the interoperability testing," notes Teirlinck. "Amdahl has done the integration for them, so they can just install and go. Customers get all the benefits of a SAN without the complexity."
Up to 48 100MB-per-second fibre channel ports can be configured. The integrated SAN gives customers immediate access to the benefits of a SAN: improved performance, non-disruptive growth, a centralised storage pool, centralised management, and LANless and serverless backups - without the challenges of designing, installing, and integrating their own SAN.
The GSS 4900 is the first storage offering to integrate storage management software within the storage system. Advanced Function Engines can carry out centralised backups to directly attached tape drives. This offloads the customer`s application servers and networks, and avoids contention on the LAN and SAN.
Matthew Wiltshire, director at London consultancy Source, comments: "As a product it looks awesome and in terms of what it`s purporting to do - allowing a completely mixed environment - it looks very good."
John McArthur of International Data Corporation says: "Amdahl`s I-SAN approach to integrating a storage area network into the GSS 4900 can go a long way towards reducing the complexity of implementation and greatly reduce the time to realise benefits."
Ted Mariner of Veritas, an early GSS 4900 user, says: "The Giga-Screamer certainly has huge performance. We have observed between 50% and 100% increase in available bandwidth for our standard configuration. This directly translates into a significant improvement in price/performance and throughput of our core data processing systems."
Amdahl is aiming the Giga-Screamer at the Unix and NT market. The 4900 will link to servers running Windows NT/2000, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM`s AIX, Linux and Novell NetWare.
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