ATTO Technology's ExpressSAS® RAID Adapters are First to Bring the Power of Serial Attached SCSI Storage to the Macintosh Platform

Jan 09, 2007

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Macworld Expo, San Francisco, CA, January 9, 2007 — ATTO Technology, Inc., global leader of storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions for data-intensive computing environments, will showcase its new ExpressSAS® RAID adapters at the MacWorld Expo, Booth #S1243.

With the introduction of the ExpressSAS® product line, ATTO becomes the first manufacturer to deliver the affordable performance of Serial Attached SCSI RAID technology to the Macintosh platform. Designed to take full advantage of the high-speed PCI Express I/O architecture of Apple's Intel-based MacPro workstations and Xserve servers, ATTO's ExpressSAS® RAID adapters deliver the high performance required for digital media production and delivery, streaming applications, I/O intensive server requirements and other data intensive OS X-based applications.

ATTO's delivery of Apple-compatible SAS RAID solutions is the latest chapter in the company's long history of support and innovation for the Mac platform. ATTO has spent the past 18 years developing product for the Macintosh market and working closely with Apple to deliver superior, high-quality products with proven interoperability and compatibility in the Apple market. In addition to the new ExpressSAS® RAID adapters, ATTO's ExpressPCI SCSI adapters and Celerity 4-Gb Fibre Channel host adapters have been certified on the Intel Xeon-based MacPro and Xserve systems, complete with standard and customized drivers for Mac OS X users to allow for effortless integration into Apple environments.

“ATTO's commitment to the Macintosh market has never wavered and the combination of Apple's new Intel-based workstations and servers with ATTO's SAS RAID technology provides Mac users with powerful yet affordable solutions to tackle the most data-intensive IT and digital content applications,” said Ed Tierney, director of marketing at ATTO Technology.

ATTO's new ExpressSAS® RAID adapters are the industry's first and only products with a true low-profile form factor that fit standard-length PCI Express slots, making them ideal for compact designs such as the Xserve systems where real estate is at a premium. The ExpressSAS® products are also the industry's only low-profile line of adapters offering user selectable port configuration options, enabling customers to select the optimal mix of internal and external SAS connections.

These new RAID controllers leverage the power of ATTO's customer-proven high-performance RAID technology – including the company's proprietary Advanced Data Streaming (ADS™) Technology that alleviates data transfer bottlenecks -- and Intel's new 800MHz PCIe Intel® IOP348 I/O Processors with integrated high-performance XScale® technology to meet the most demanding performance requirements of data intensive applications, including transactional databases, email servers, large server farms and digital media.

Featuring advanced fault-tolerant features that include hot swap, hot spares, online capacity expansion, battery back-up, and optimized disk utilization for SAS drives, SATA II drives, or any combination of the two, the ATTO ExpressSAS® R348 and R380 adapters deliver an intelligent and robust low-profile RAID solution. The SAS and SATA II support make it easy to create costeffective multi-tiered storage solutions in a single cabinet, utilizing cost-correct SATA drives for secondary storage while staging critical primary data on higher-performance SAS disks. These adapters will support standard RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 and feature ATTO's exclusive DVRAID, making them capable of handling the most demanding Mac-based digital media applications, such as 2K and 4K film, multiple layers of complex, uncompressed real-time effects, and high definition video editing.

The ATTO ExpressSAS® RAID Adapters combine x8 PCI Express technology and SAS speeds for high-performance server environments and applications. SAS is the next generation SCSI interface that delivers significant improvements in scalability, performance, reliability, and flexibility over parallel SCSI by leveraging a serial architecture for data transport. PCI Express is a low-cost, highly scalable serial technology that delivers added performance by increasing the I/O capacity while eliminating bus contention. This allows for faster and more efficient performance with reduced I/O bottlenecks.