GRANDE VITESSE SYSTEMS
For Immediate Release June 23, 1999
Grande Vitesse Systems

NOMADIC Array Model 2000 Series
Capacity and Performance That Scale in Concert
For servers that require 100-200GB of capacity, we'd like to introduce the cabinet-size NOMADIC™ Array Model 2000 Series. Because of its modular design, this disk array subsystem can easily and cost-effectively add storage capacity and performance.

Combined with our NOMADIC rack, it delivers the scalability needed for large, mission-critical data center applications at an exceptionally low price per gigabyte. With the 2000 Series, you can connect up to 56 large form factor drives for up to 300 gigabytes in a single cabinet — with the added benefit of protecting your investment in 3.5-inch disks.

Furthermore, the NOMADIC Array's intelligent controller, with nonvolatile cache, off loads the I/O processing burden from the server so performance increases as you add more arrays to your system.

With their leading-edge SCSI-3 interface, our NOMADICstorage Array subsystems give you more bandwidth than other disk arrays. They also allow you to use SCSI-2, so the host system and the disk array can reside in different buildings.

To ensure that you won't lose any data — even if a disk drive should fail — our NOMADIC Array subsystems provide RAID levels 5, 1, and 0+1. They even give you the additional flexibility of RAID-0 and independent disks, all at the same time. So you can choose the ideal configuration to match your requirements for availability, performance, capacity, and price.

With the hot-spare option, you have the luxury of choosing the most convenient time to replace a faulty disk. A built-in spare goes to work automatically, rebuilding your data and restoring the system to full speed. Replace the faulty disk when it's convenient for you. With our warm-plug feature, you don't even have to shut off the power. Which means you don't have to reboot.

Should you want even more peace of mind, our NOMADIC Array products are also backed by GVS Service, one of the industry's highest rated service and support organizations. But the beauty of these innovative disk arrays is just how much you can do for yourself.

Management Made Easy
Almost all administrative tasks can be handled on-line. The NOMADIC Volume Manager software enables you to monitor component status, tune performance, even re configure the system using simple manual techniques — all while users continue to access information and run all their applications.

In other words, our NOMADIC Array subsystems not only make system administrators' lives easier, they can make your whole business more productive.

All models in the NOMADIC Array Series come with a five-year warranty on disk drives, one year on other components.

NOMADIC RAID 2000

The NOMADIC RAID Series disk storage system incorporates real-time RAID, SCSI drives, and industry standard interfaces with Storage Concepts' dual-bus system architecture to deliver guaranteed performance and data integrity. It also offers an industry first: internal 80 MB/s data path across the 32- bit Extended Differential Fast Bus (EDFB), and sustained data rates of 20 MB/s across the 32-bit SCSI2, SCSI-3 with 160 MB/s, 72-bit XOR engine. This dual-bus architecture ensures image integrity and image delivery in real-time operations to a large user base and is supported with an RS-232 port for remote system control and status reporting.

Many features are found in the NOMADIC RAID Series that are not available in other RAID systems. These include pluggable interfaces that provide interchangeable system characteristics to allow multimodality support for cost efficiency while maintaining the original system investment. Also available are hot-pluggable, dual redundant power supplies, fans, and drives that can be inserted or pulled out during operation without any downtime.

Our Matrix Array architecture provides the on-demand increased system performance and capacity required in most applications. It also supports multiple Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) for economical system expansion up to 252GB.

The NOMADIC RAID boasts even more features, such as a parity disk, Fast and Wide SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 channel pluggable interfaces, on-the-fly error detection and correction, optimal redundant power supplies, and system cooling. All of these combined allow the NOMADIC RAID 2000 to deliver guaranteed real-time performance and data integrity.

NOMADIC Array Model 1000 Series
Our Unique Design Delivers Singular Reliability, Performance, and More.
The NOMADIC™ Array 1000 Series provides an unmatched combination of capacity, performance, high availability, and manageability at surprisingly low prices. This line of disk arrays integrates a remarkable number of features — RAID, hot spares, a SCSI-3 Channel, and a dualported controller for system failure, to name just a few — so you'll have something you can really use. Peace of mind.

Capacity and Performance That Scale in Concert
Because of its modular design, the NOMADIC Array 1000 Series can easily and cost-effectively add storage capacity and performance.

The base configuration of the compact, stackable NOMADIC Array 1000 Series includes seven high-performance, low-profile disk drives, and you can add four dozen more. For even greater capacity, you can connect two arrays to each host system. So you can handle hundreds of gigabytes of data.

Furthermore, the NOMADIC Array's intelligent controller, with nonvolatile cache, offloads the I/O processing burden from the server so performance increases as you add more arrays to your system.

With their leading-edge SCSI-3 interface, the NOMADIC Array subsystems give you more bandwidth than other disk arrays. They also allow you to use SCSI-2, so the host system and the disk array can reside in different buildings.

The NOMADIC Array 1000 Series is an ideal marriage of form and function. Every component is pluggable. There are no internal cables. No screws. The clean design makes it inherently reliable.

To ensure that you won't lose any data — even if a disk drive should fail — our NOMADIC Array subsystems provide RAID levels 5, 1, and 0+1. They even give you the additional flexibility of RAID-0 and independent disks, all at the same time. So you can choose the ideal configuration to match your requirements for availability, performance, capacity, and price.

With the hot-spare option, you have the luxury of choosing the most convenient time to replace a faulty disk. A built-in spare goes to work automatically, rebuilding your data and restoring the system to full speed.

And when you're ready, replacing a disk takes less than 20 seconds — no tools required. With our warm-plug feature, you don't even have to shut off the power. Which means you don't have to reboot.

Should you want even more peace of mind, our NOMADIC Array products are also backed by GVS Service, one of the industry's highest rated service and support organizations. But the beauty of these innovative disk arrays is just how much you can do for yourself.

Management Made Easy
Almost all administrative tasks can be handled on-line. You can monitor component status, tune performance, even reconfigure the system using simple manual items — all while users continue to access information and run all their applications.

In other words, our NOMADIC Array subsystems not only make system administrators' lives easier, they can make your whole business more productive. *All models in the NOMADIC Array Series come with a five-year warranty on disk drives, one year on other components.

NOMADICstorage™ Array Series: The industry's most innovative storage solution.
Table of Contents
• Capacity and performance that scale in concert
• Putting an end to unplanned downtime
• NOMADICstorage Array Series Specifications

The one thing you demand from your information systems, above all else, is dependability. Benchmarks and gigabytes don't mean much if the system isn't up and running. But you don't need us to tell you that. What you do need is an affordable solution that is easy to implement and even easier to maintain.

Our NOMADICstorage™ Array subsystems provide an unmatched combination of capacity, performance, high availability, and manageability at surprisingly low prices. This line of disk arrays integrate a remarkable number of features — RAID, hot spares, a high-speed SCSI-3 Channel, and a dual-ported controller for system failure, to name just a few — so you'll have something you can really use: Peace of mind.

Capacity and Performance That Scale in Concert
Because of their modular design, both the NOMADICstorage Array 1000 Series and 2000 Series can easily and cost-effectively add storage capacity and performance.

The base configuration of the compact, stackable NOMADICstorage Array 1000 Series includes seven high-performance, low-profile disk drives — and you can add three dozen more. For even greater capacity, you can connect two arrays to each host system. So, whether you're dealing with hundreds of gigabytes or even a terabyte or more, these subsystems will do the job.

For enterprise servers requiring multiple terabytes of capacity, we introduce the cabinet-size NOMADICstorage Array 2000 Series. Combined with our NOMADIC rack, it delivers the scalability needed for large mission-critical data center applications at an exceptionally low price per gigabyte. With the 2000 Series, you can connect up to 56 large form factor drives for up to 300 gigabytes in a single cabinet — with the added benefit of protecting your investment on 3.5-inch disks.

Furthermore, the NOMADICstorage Array's intelligent controller, with non-volatile cache, off loads the I/O processing burden from the server, so performance increases as you add more arrays to your system.

With their leading-edge SCSI-3 interface, our NOMADICstorage Array subsystems give you more bandwidth than other disk arrays. They also allow you to use differentiation so the host system and the disk array can reside in different locations.

To ensure that you won't lose any data — even if a disk drive should fail — our NOMADICstorage Array subsystems provide RAID levels 5, 4, 1, and 0+1. They even give you the additional flexibility of RAID 0 and independent disks, all at the same time. So you can choose the ideal configuration to match your requirements for availability, performance, capacity, and price.

With the hot-spare option, you have the luxury of choosing the most convenient time to replace a faulty disk. A built-in spare goes to work automatically, rebuilding your data and restoring the system to full speed. And when you're ready, replacing a disk in the NOMADIC Series takes less than 20 seconds — no tools required. With our warm-plug feature, you don't even have to shut off the power. Which means you don't have to reboot.

Should you want even more peace of mind, our NOMADICstorage Array products are also backed by GVS Service, one of the industry's highest rated service and support organizations. But the beauty of these innovative disk arrays is just how much you can do for yourself.

Almost all administrative tasks can be handled on line. You can monitor component status, tune performance, even re configure the system using simple icon selection, drag-and-drop commands — all while users continue to access information and run all their applications.

In other words, our NOMADICstorage Array subsystems not only make system administrators' lives easier, they can make your whole business more productive.

NOMADICstorage Array Series Specifications
Common to Model 1000 and Model 2000 Series
Main Memory
Main processor RISC CPU®
Read/write cache 4 MB nonvolatile RAM on board upgrade to 512MB
(battery module on daughter card)

Bus/cache controller Internal 80 MB/s, 76-bit DMA
data path with 160 MB/s
72-bit XOR engine
DMA-band 1/0 Channels.
Host System Interface

Interfaces to host Supports virtually any operating system with SCSI with block size divisible by eight. Dual ported (optional) Internal SCSI channels Eight intelligent, low-overhead processors, fast/wide (20 MB/sec) SCSI-2, SCSI-3 (Ultra SCSI and Fiber Channels are optional) SCSI Two, 20 MB/s (40MB/S), fast/wide, singleendedFast/ Wide/Differential (Ultra SCSI and Fiber Channels are optional).

Interface Channel Standards Supports virtually any Operating System. Ranks Up to seven ranks per system (up to 56 SCSI devices) 780 nanometer short-wave laser

Cable Type 68 pin SCSI-3
Maximum cable length 50 feet (standard)
Software
NOMADICstorage Volume Included with array subsystem
Manager graphical user interface.
Dual RS-232 serial parts for environmental monitor
and remote terminal.

Virtual storage management Independent disks, volume concatenation RAID levels 0 (striping), 1 (mirroring), 0+1 (mirrored stripes), 4 (striping with defined parity), and 5 (striping with rotated parity).On-line storage reorganization and load balancing.Visual performance displays for tuningComplete status displays Command line interface also provided

Specific to Model 1000 Series
Packaging
Subsystem includes Intelligent array controller 3 to 30 disk drives in 4 trays.High reliability power supply.Variable-speed fans with rotation and temperature sensors hot swapable. (Note: each power supply has additional self-contained fan) LCD panel with status displays for disk drives, fans, battery, controller, audible alarm, temperature warning, fan failure, and power on self-test.

Standard mounting Table top
Mounting options Tower stand
Stacking kit with power distribution base
Locking module
Rack-mount kit
Disk Drives

Form factor 3.5-in. low-profile Single Connector
Supported drives 9.1-GB 7200 RPM Fast & Fast-Wide
9.1-GB 7200 RPM Ultra SCSI (16-bit)
4.2-GB 7200 RPM Fast-Wide SCSI-2
4.2-GB 7200 RPM Ultra SCSI (16-bit)

2.1-GB 5400 RPM fast-wide SCSI-2 (8-bit) Environment
AC Power 100-240 VAC, 47-63 Hz, 6.5 amps at 100 VAC
Operating 10° C to 40° C (50° F to 104° F)
20% to 80% relative humidity, non-condensing

Non-operating -20° C to 60° C (-4° F to 140° F)
5% to 85% relative humidity, non-condensing

Operating acoustic noise 6.0 bels (at 25° C)
Dimensions and Weight
Height 22.7 cm (8.94 in.)
Width 49.4 cm (19.46 in.)
Depth 53.5 cm (21.06 in.)
Weight (without disk drives) 30 kg (66 lb.) approx.
Weight (with 30 disk drives) 48 kg (106 lb.) approx.
Power cord 1.83 meters (6 feet)

Specific to Model 2000 Series
Packaging
Subsystem includes Intelligent array controller
Two SCSI interface boards, each with 2 fast/wide differential SCSI-2 and -3 interfaces
Display board with status displays for fans, battery, controller, and power on self-test
High reliability power supply
Cooling system, including two fans with rotation and temperature sensor

Ordered separately Nomadic Drive
Nomadic 7 Bay

Mounting Rack-mount

Disk drive trays Up to 8 trays per Model 2000 subsystem 2 to 7 drives per tray

Separate power supply and cooling in each tray Status LEDs for each drive

Disk Drives
Form factor 3.5-in. half height
Supported drives 4.2-GB fast/wide SCSI-3

Environment
AC Power 200-240 VAC, 47-63 Hz, 24 amps
Operating 10° C to 40° C (50° F to 104° F) 20% to 80% relative humidity, non-condensing Non operating -20° C to 60° C (-4° F to 140° F) 5% to 95% relative humidity, non-condensing

Operating acoustic noise 6.0 bels (at 25° C)
Declared noise emissions in accordance with ISO 9296
Dimensions and Weight
Height 143 cm (56 in.)
Width 77 cm (30 in.)
Depth 99 cm (39 in.)
Weight (with 36 disk drives) 394 kg (867 lb.) approx.
Power cord 4.6 meters (15 feet)

NOMADIC Rack
NOMADIC™ Rack enhances the versatility and security of UNIX®, PC, and Mac systems used for a demanding technical and commercial applications. By increasing the availability, flexibility, safety and performance of UNIX storage subsystems,

NOMADIC Rack provides system administrators and users features previously available only on proprietary systems. NOMADIC Rack addresses critical customer needs for I/O performance, high data availability, easy large system administration, and enhanced system performance. It provides these key capabilities for demanding commercial environments:

• Disk mirroring, hot spares, and RAID-5 for data availability;
• Large file system support and file system expansion for flexibility;
• Disk striping and RAID-5 for performance; and,
• A journalling file system for improved system performance and quick recovery.

These technologies are integrated into a single solution with the power and administrative features required for mission-critical applications.

Users and administrators with demanding commercial and technical applications can take advantage of NOMADIC Rack's powerful features:

• Disk mirroring handles all disk failures transparently.
• RAID-5 for the most cost-effective combination of data availability and performance.
• Fully automatic on-line recovery with "hot spares" facility.
• Shared device support for high availability configurations.
• Journalling UNIX file system eliminates ‘fsck’ for fast system recovery.
• File system size is expandable on-line up to 1 Terabyte.
• Increased performance through disk striping.
• Multi-threaded (hot) drivers for scalable I/O performance.
• Journalling UNIX file system increases multimedia, prepress, NFS® and database server performance.
• Icon-Driven User Interface for error free metadevice set-up and administration.
• Flexibility to manage and re configure hundreds of disks on-line.
• Uses loadable driver technology – no more kernel rebuilds.
• Fully compatible with standard UNIX file system, Mac, and PC platforms.
• Fully compatible with file system and database applications.

Key Features and Benefits
RAID
RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is a way of classifying and varying levels of data availability and performance as they relate to cost. RAID-0 (disk striping) provides high performance but low-level data availability. RAID-1 (disk mirroring) provides high data availability but at the higher cost. RAID-0+1 provides the best performance and the highest data availability but also at a higher cost. RAID levels 3, 4, and 5 provide varying levels of performance and data availability at varying costs. These RAID levels were invented specifically to balance high data availability and performance with a reasonable cost modes. All RAID devices are seen as single logical disks to both users and applications. NOMADIC Rack provides RAID levels 0, 1, and 5.

Disk Striping (RAID-0)
Disk striping augments application performance by increasing I/O throughput. Disk striping spreads the I/O load over several disks, increasing the throughput available to a single process. Disk striping can improve the performance of any properly configured disk technology. With NOMADIC Rack, striped disks can easily be mirrored for increased data availability.

Disk Mirroring (RAID-1)
Disk mirroring allows users to continue working even if there is a disk or controller failure. NOMADIC Rack transparently maintains a "mirror" copy of the data on another disk and automatically uses the surviving copy in the event of hardware failure. With NOMADIC Rack, all disks in the system can be mirrored; even system-disk failures will not interrupt users. The mirrored sets have full automatic replication consistency which prevents data corruption even when there are compound failures. Data recovery and reconfiguration are on-line. On-line recovery is supplemented by the unique "hot spare" feature which automatically migrates new partitions in to replace failing ones. Not only are users still supported on the surviving copy of the data, but a new mirror is automatically generated.

RAID-5
RAID-5 provides highly available data storage at a reduced cost over mirroring (RAID-1) while delivering higher performance. RAID-5 distributes parity information across all disks in the RAID. This allows recovery of any single disk failure within the RAID without the loss of data. Typical environments are characterized by having high request rates of small to medium sized requests. RAID-5 is the best RAID solution for the typical environment – offering high performance and high data availability at a reasonable cost. Menu Driven User Interfaces are stripes, mirrors, concatenations, RAID-5 sets, and UFS logging devices.

RAID provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the administration of these devices. This GUI allows error-free set-up of metadevices along with allowing easy ongoing administration.

Large File System Support
In the past, when a file system was out of space, the system administrator had to move files around or even completely reconstruct the file system on a larger disk. Users were interrupted for long periods. NOMADIC Rack eliminates this problem with a set of virtual disk and file system enhancements to improve administrative flexibility. The file system can "grow" to include new disk capacity. With NOMADIC Rack, the administrator just adds a new partition to the file system, and issues the on-line "grow file system" command. In addition, a file system can now grow to the full size of the storage subsystem – up to one terabyte of data can be held in a single file system, and mirrored for increased safety.

Journalling UNIX File System
When coming back on-line after a reboot, UNIX checks file systems for integrity. Although a time consuming operation in large systems, "fsck" was necessary to avoid system panics and data corruption. The Journalling UNIX file system (UFS) included in NOMADIC Rack eliminates the need for this process, enabling fast system recovery. This can show an improvement of over two orders of magnitude: the previous "fsck" took 10 minutes or more per gigabyte, with NOMADIC Rack recovery can be done in less than 10 seconds per gigabyte. This feature is compatible with the standard UNIX file system and does not require any data conversion. With a journalling UFS, updates are safely recorded in a "log" before they are applied. NOMADIC Rack allows the "log" to be mirrored for increased safety. A journalling UNIX file system also increases system performance through faster directory, file create and delete operations, and improved synchronous data writes. These enhancements can improve application performance significantly, particularly when using NFS and database servers.

Shared Device Support
NOMADIC Rack supports high availability configurations where multiple hosts share access to the same physical device. When used by Sun's future high availability products for NFS and DBMS, NOMADIC Rack helps *facilitate* host failure through shared device support.

Requirements
Operating System Software

• Solaris 2.3 or later for SPARC®
• Apple Macintosh
• PC with NT file system
• SGI w/SCSI Interface

Typical System Configuration
• 64MB RAM
• 2GB disk space with at least 2 drives

Distribution Media
• CD-ROM

Availability
NOMADIC Rack is available immediately and is packaged with Solaris 2.4 Workgroup Server and Enterprise Server products. It is also available as an unbundled product. Source product is also available.