BANGALORE, INDIA: LSI Corp. announced enhancements to the Engenio 7900 Storage System, which provides midrange storage area network (SAN) customers with a “future-proof” storage infrastructure designed to meet the demands of continuous data growth and evolving application, configuration and capacity requirements.

New LSI Engenio 7900 features and functionality include 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (8GFC) interfaces, which provide up to twice the bandwidth per channel between server and storage, and pay-as-you-grow scalability up to 448 drives for nearly double the capacity. SafeStore encryption services also have been added for comprehensive data-at-rest security using self-encrypting drives (SED), as well as a simplified management interface that doesn’t sacrifice control.

The Engenio 7900 is one of the industry’s first enterprise-class midrange storage systems based on 8GFC technology. It combines 8GFC connectivity with industry-leading, mixed workload performance and configuration flexibility to meet the diverse application requirements of large-scale virtualization and consolidation implementations, high-performance computing and data warehousing environments.

The system’s 8GFC host cards eliminate the need to make trade-offs between system performance and server I/O slot conservation by reducing the number of host bus adapters (HBAs) per server and the number of overall ports in the Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure required to deliver comparable performance. This results in lower hardware acquisition and operational costs through fewer components and infrastructure simplification.

The system’s ability to auto-negotiate Fibre Channel links allows it to seamlessly integrate into an existing 2GFC or 4GFC infrastructure to provide customers in these environments with immediate performance and connectivity benefits. By utilizing existing infrastructure, the 7900 establishes a foundation for the future upgrade to 8GFC SAN environments.