Adaptec launches Series 5 RAID controllers

Adaptec has launched the Adaptec RAID Series 5 Unified Serial controller family. The company claimed that this was the first product to offer 28-port connectivity with internal and external ports that achieved performance up to five times faster than competitive products.

The company said that the controllers had been engineered to deliver the industry's most cost-effective way for increasing data storage access and scalability, allowing up to 256 SATA or SAS drives to be seamlessly connected to a single system providing approximately 200TB of storage capacity. These efficient new PCIe interface controllers are designed for a wide range of storage-critical, bandwidth-intensive applications such as web hosting, digital video surveillance, medical imaging and communications.

Building on Adaptec's Unified Serial Architecture platform, the Adaptec RAID Series 5 family's design of up to 28 ports - 24 internal and 4 external - allows enterprises to use low cost SATA while delivering SAS performance and reliability. The Series 5 multi-port design allows enterprise customers to 'future-proof' today's system expenditures with the knowledge that as data capacity demands grow, additional storage hardware can be effortlessly added or swapped.

"Our Series 5 controller family represents yet another Adaptec engineering milestone," said Suresh Panikar, director, worldwide marketing, Adaptec. "Our long-standing relationship with virtually all of the major systems and storage providers gives us a unique industry perspective to develop storage controllers with the features, functionality and economies that our customers demand in their next-generation offerings. The engine for this innovation is Adaptec's Unified Serial Architecture platform which has set the benchmark in the data storage arena."

According to Brian Babineau, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, "Enterprises need technology environments that can adapt to the ever-changing profile of data being created and stored on a regular basis. Today it's database transactions and web files, tomorrow it's medical images and streaming video content. Customers need flexible, modular, high performing storage environments as rich media and file content represent the preponderance of capacity that will be deployed in coming years.

"Adaptec, which has long been known for its ability to stay one step ahead of evolving market dynamics, is particularly suited to address this need. The new Series 5 RAID controllers meet these needs with compatibility that makes it easy for anyone to deploy, in any environment. Most importantly, this new product family has performance characteristics that are well suited for the deluge of digital information that is upon us."

The Adaptec Series 5 RAID controller family enables global enterprises, typically employing multiple hardware platforms and running more than one operating system, to easily enhance the scalability and reliability of disk drives ranging from cost-effective, high-capacity SATA disk drives, high-performance SAS drives, or both, across existing networks or within a single system.

All seven Series 5 controllers will be shipping and available through worldwide distributors and resellers from 21 March.