Ciprico Launches RAIDcore 5000 Series

Ciprico Inc., a leading provider of intelligent storage software, solutions and appliances, announced today that it is starting volume production of its new RAIDCore™ RC5000 line of SAS and SATA II RAID controllers. A successor to Ciprico’s earlier 4000 series, the new controllers promise a new level of performance at a lower price-point for Windows™ and Linux™ servers, workstations, personal computers and other embedded stor ¬age appliances employing RAID level protection. The company is demonstrating the new cards this week at Gartner’s IT Visions conference in Hollywood, Florida.

“The new RC5000 series marks our first significant step into the enterprise IT and hybrid digital me ¬dia-IT storage markets,” said Steve Merrifield, president and chief executive officer for Ciprico. “The RAIDCore software with the RC5000 series of products gives us a significantly stronger core com ¬petence in host RAID software that complements our existing core hardware RAID business. Given the substantial processing power now provided by today’s multi-core CPUs, over the next several months and years we see a rapid shift toward pure software based RAID implementations inside of servers accelerated by products such as the new RC5000 family. Software based RAID significantly reduces overall system costs and offers improved performance.”

The new RC5000 series controllers provide support for the latest serial attached SCSI (SAS) and serial ATA II (SATA II) specifications, as well as supporting both the traditional PCI-X™ and newer PCI Express ® bus standards. Shipping in May will be the 8 port versions of the 5000 family, specifi ¬cally the low profile PCI-X based RC5110-08 and RC5152-08 boards, along with the RC5210-08 and RC5252-08 PCIe boards. All versions support the new mini-SAS SFF8087 connectors. Mid-year, the company plans to ship higher port count 12 and 16 port SAS/SATA II boards, RC5252-12 and RC5252-16, based on the recently announced Marvell 6640 SAS/SATA II controller chip. The new software drivers released with the 5000 series boards will support Windows™ and Linux™ op ¬erating systems, and are fully compatible with the earlier 4000 series. The company expects to offer support for Intel ® and nVidia ® based motherboards as part of its next generation Universal RAID ¬Core™ software stack later this year.

These new cards have demonstrated laboratory performance of more than 1.1GByte/s throughput using only 16 SATA II drives. Using the advanced spanning algorithms, it is possible to create virtual arrays of up to 32 drives with any configuration of 4, 8, 12 or 16 port boards. As with earlier gen ¬erations, these algorithms also provide mixed drive size support without loss of disk capacity. This highly flexible architecture minimizes OEM and system builder inventories.

The new adapters will be distributed by Avnet and Bell Microproducts. “Avnet’s collaborative engi ¬neering, design support, integration and distribution capabilities help channel partners bring com ¬plete storage solutions to market quickly. We look forward to offering our partners Ciprico’s new RAIDCore RC5000 series of RAID controllers so that they can take advantage of a rich feature set, high bandwidth SAS and SATA II support, and new software support storage configurations,” said Mike Gaeta, Vice President of Marketing, Avnet Applied Computing Solutions.
“Bell Microproducts is a great partner for your RAIDCore RAID controllers,” said George Roscoe, Director of Enterprise Storage Marketing. “The Bell Micro Sales team has a long history of support ¬ing system builder and OEM customers with their storage and computing needs and RAIDCore has been and will be a part of our storage solutions strategy. Together Bell Micro and Ciprico are excited by the opportunity to work with partners to develop new solutions based on such a new and differ ¬entiated RAID controller solution.”

US recommended retail pricing for the enterprise level RAID 5 class RC5152-08 and RC5252-08 products are $299, with the entry level RAID 0, 1, 10 versions of the cards, the RC5110-08 and RC5210-08 priced at $219. Production is starting now, with the 12 and 16 port cards expected to start shipping in the third quarter of this year.