iSCSI and SAS is no doubt heading its way into mainstream storage market at full speed. Qsan has positioned itself as iSCSI and SAS expert ever since established in year 2004. Being in the perfect position to take full advantage of this industry surge, Qsan is proud to announce the general availability of two cutting-edge RAID controller series: P200C and S500C.

P200C is the latest iSCSI-SAS RAID controller built around Qsan innovative RAID/iSCSI stack, featuring industry-leading performance on IOP platform ever since the previous generation. With 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected to the host, either working independently, trunking, or MPIO together, Qsan lab data shows up to 120,000 IOPS by 512B block-size. Running against multiple hosts with sufficient CPU power, P200C can achieve up to 600MB/sec including both read and write. The outstanding performance is produced by not only the highly-optimized Qsan stack but also strong computing power offered by Intel XScale IOP342. Dual core architecture makes it possible for Qsan to run RAID processing in one core while full iSCSI offload in the other. At drive-side P200C supports SAS drives, thus SATA compatible. Not only it supports up to 16 drives in single enclosure, there is a SAS JBOD expansion port, connectible to 4 SAS JBODs up to 80 drives with 128TB size limit. Other useful features in previous products are also included such as RAID 6, on-line migration, web-based management, snapshot (QSnap) and so on. Qsan has certified P200C against VMware ESX server internally based on many customer requests quite recently.

S500C is the SAS-SAS RAID controller built upon Intel IOP341. LSI controller and expander are designed on-board to offer SAS interface to host-side, drive-side up to 16 drives, and SAS JBOD as external. At host-side two 4-lane wide ports connectible to two separate or clustered hosts. Qsan lab data shows up to 1GB/sec as the maximum performance. Same as P200C, the drive side supports both SAS/SATA drives and SAS JBOD expansion. Both controllers are available in 8bay, 12bay, 16bay and 24bay models depending on different form-factor requirements. Both are single-board design which requires customized backplanes.

"P200C is the strong and unique answer to the iSCSI doubters in the market: those who think iSCSI is slow, those who think iSCSI is low-end, and those who does not believe server-based iSCSI is reliable." said Eric Kao, sales & marketing V.P. in Qsan, "while we try to realize the unlimited imagination associated with SAS by S500C, that is, what kind of market size to be expected if something is each of the following at the same time: the next-generation of SCSI, compatible to vast SATA needs terabytes-wise as of now, essentially a SAN technology, and the most important of all, running as fast as Fibre ?"

Both controllers are available for shipping starting from the end of July. Recommended 2U and 3U subsystems are also available. Please contact sales@qsan.com.tw for more product and pricing information.