JMR Electronics MARLIN Storage System

JMR offers its customers the newest in technologies with the introduction of the MARLIN Storage System, a 4 GB to host, SATA/SAS to the drives 16-BAY solution. Our newest design with a 3U 16 drive system that can offer up to 8 TB of capacity with SATA drives and 2.3 TB with SAS 10K drives. This provides the ultimate in connectivity, performance, and price.

With the MARLIN, JMR becomes the first independent RAID systems vendor to announce a Fibre Channel to SATA/SAS solution. The system supports a four-gigabit Fibre Channel host interface and a three-gigabit disk drive connection. The system also offers native support for Snapshot, RAID 6, and the SMI-S open industry management standard.

The system's support for both SAS and SATA disk drives allows customers to manage multiple tiers of applications on a single subsystem. Customers can use the SAS drives for primary storage applications such as transactional databases, and use the SATA drives for secondary applications such as disk-to-disk backup.

JMR's MARLIN supplies 16 SAS channels to which SAS, SATA II, or SATA I drives can be connected. For higher performance environments, the use of SAS disk drives provides maximum bandwidth and I/O for data intensive applications. Where cost is a primary issue or where the use of secondary storage for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), nearline storage, Content Addressable Storage (CAS), or disk-to-disk back-up deployments are needed, the MARLIN supports the use of more cost effective SATA disk drives, dramatically lowering subsystem cost and TCO. The MARLIN also supports the intermixing of SAS and SATA disk drives within the same enclosure for unmatched configuration flexibility. With its standard 4x wide SAS expansion port, the MARLIN can quickly and inexpensively be expanded with additional enclosures and subsystem configurations supporting 1000's of disk drives.

The 16-Bay MARLIN disk array is powered by a sophisticated RAID controller technology. With 64-bit architecture and advanced firmware, functions run by the Intel RISC processor, data is distributed and processed at raging speed among CPU, memory, and drives.

JMR's flexible design delivers both the bandwidth and I/O rates needed by dense and high capacity external storage designs. The controller, powered by the Intel® IOP331 I/O processor with Intel XScale® technology, supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60, while supporting up to 64 RAID groups per controller of up to 16 disk drives in each RAID group.

Other important advanced capabilities include variable stripe size, read ahead caching, and dynamic cache allocation for improved I/O performance.

MARLIN offers several features designed to provide network administrators with exceptional management and flexibility. The controller includes JMR's online RAID expansion tool suite, which allows administrators to add drives to existing arrays and re-stripe data across all drives without taking the array off-line. The controller also supports immediate RAID availability, which brings an array on-line in a matter of seconds, and features non-disruptive firmware downloading for the controller, enclosure management, and attached disk drives.

MARLIN integrates JMR RAID Manager™ software, a new Java-based enterprise RAID management software application that enables the RAID system to be configured, managed, and monitored. The easy-to-use JMR RAID Manager provides one of the industry's most comprehensive sets of Java-based RAID management tools including SMI-S support, remote event notification, error detection, enclosure management and monitoring through SES, and controller and disk drive hot plug and hot swap support.

By providing RAID 6 functionality, arrays created by the MARLIN can tolerate the failure of two disks in a RAID group and still deliver continuous data availability to the host. Using JMR's advanced firmware and hardware parity regeneration, data is protected even if two disks in a RAID group fail. Through the use of RAID 6, and the hierarchical RAID implementation of RAID 60, the MARLIN provides maximum data reliability and availability.

For additional information, please contact your JMR Sales representative today.