Boston Igloo 3U-32 AX-Stor-iS

Designed as a dual-redundant iSCSI SAN for high availability applications the AXStor-iS is an excellent storage choice all the way from SMB right up to enterprise applications.

The AXStor-iS is based on the Storage Bridge Bay 2.0 specification and provides exceptional performance and fault tolerance to meet the need of today’s demanding data storage environments. Each controller has four 1Gb Ethernet host interfaces and the enclosure uses dual controllers each with a PowerPC processor and three independent PCI Express busses to deliver maximum bandwidth. This outstanding performance is matched only by its flexibility, supporting a choice of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), and SATA (Serial ATA) drive configurations, for hosting multiple tiers of data. SATA drives can be selected for capacity-oriented storage while SAS drives can be employed for IO intensive tasks.

For applications that require either fault tolerance (such as databases) or maximum performance (video/broadcast applications), the AXStor-iS features dual active-active operation as standard and each controller has a dedicated high speed channel for cache synchronisation. In normal operation, both controllers operate at full capacity while monitoring each other. All cache data is automatically mirrored between both controllers. When one controller fails, the remaining controller takes over the I/O functions of the failed controller and all data volumes remain on-line and accessible. The failed controller can then be hot-swapped with a replacement without any downtime.

Engineered to meet stringent demands for continuous availability and scalability, the AXStor-iS features a 64-bit RISC processor with hardware RAID 5/6 and a completely cable-free SAS backplane design. The appliance directly houses up to 16 SAS or SATA hot-plug disk drives and further expansion is possible using additional SAS JBODs.