ATTO Technology Escalates Enterprise Application Processing by Up to 10 Times the Performance of Competitive Products with Serial Attached SCSI

ATTO Technology, Inc., global leader of storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions for data-intensive computing environments, today announced that internal benchmark testing has demonstrated its ExpressSAS™ RAID controllers to be the industry’s highest performance Serial Attached SCSI products across a broad range of data-intensive applications.

ATTO’s ExpressSAS controllers demonstrated more than 10x faster performance than competitive products in a series of bandwidth-stressing benchmark tests, such as running multiple backup streams, enterprise databases and document management applications.

Benchmark data highlights include:
- ExpressSAS outperforms the leading competitor by more than 10x in comparable writes
- ExpressSAS performed 15% to 20% higher than the competition in a backup application
environment
- ExpressSAS led the competition in IOPs for a database application benchmark by over 15%

“RAID performance can be a bottleneck for some throughput-heavy enterprise applications and ATTO allows such applications to run at business speed. Our ExpressSAS adapters were built to meet the needs of performance-oriented customers and applications and we now have the benchmark data to validate these products as the industry’s premiere performers in SAS RAID technology,” said Ed Tierney, director of marketing at ATTO.

The market-leading performance of ATTO’s ExpressSAS products is what separates it from similar industry products. The latest chapter in the company’s record of leadership in delivering such performance for the most demanding customers is illustrated by the fact that enterprise use of ATTO host adapters is on the rise.

Tierney credited ATTO’s performance advantage to a technically superior design that leverages the latest storage processor technology from Intel and ATTO’s customer-proven proprietary technologies that make the ExpressSAS line the only SAS RAID products optimized for the demands of information technology solutions that require high-bandwidth processing performance including data protection, “anything-on-demand,” data mining, pre-press, backup and other content-rich environments.

The ExpressSAS products are built around Intel’s new IOP348 I/O Processors with integrated high-performance XScale® technology, a dual core storage processor that allows individual processor cores to be dedicated and optimized for SAS protocol processing and RAID algorithms. ATTO’s RAID implementation is tuned for streaming data applications and includes ATTO’s exclusive DVRAID™ functionality, enabling the ExpressSAS controllers to deliver RAID 0-type performance but with parity protection, an increasingly critical issue as more digital media productions rely on direct-to-disk recording with no original recording tape as a backup. DVRAID as implemented on the ExpressSAS supports editing of two uncompressed streams of High Definition (HD) video plus alpha channel titles and 11 streams of real-time, uncompressed Standard Definition (SD) video. ExpressSAS RAID controllers also feature ATTO’s proprietary Advanced Data Streaming (ADS™) Technology to minimize latency and alleviate data transfer bottlenecks, producing faster, more efficient data movement with reduced CPU utilization.

ATTO’s 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 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.

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 cost-effective 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.

The ATTO ExpressSAS RAID Adapters combine x8 PCI Express technology and 3-Gb/sec. 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.

About ATTO Technology, Inc.
ATTO Technology, Inc. is a global leader of storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions for data-intensive computing environments. ATTO provides a wide range of end-to-end solutions to help customers’ better store, manage and deliver their data. With a focus toward markets that require higher performance, ATTO manufactures host adapters, bridges, RAID and virtual tape appliances, and management software. ATTO solutions are based on providing a high level of connectivity to all storage interfaces including SCSI, SATA, iSCSI, NDMP, SAS and Fibre Channel. ATTO distributes its products worldwide directly to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), systems integrators, VARs and authorized distributors. Contact ATTO Technology, Inc. world headquarters, at: 155 CrossPoint Parkway, Amherst, New York 14068; Phone: (716) 691-1999; Fax: (716) 691-9353; website: attotech.com.

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