Intransa Tuesday announced a new IP storage-area network appliance that operates at 10Gbit/sec to alleviate application-performance bottlenecks.

The 10 Gigabit Ethernet StorStac (PCU100) appliance is the third in Intransa's family of IP SAN devices. It follows the company's 1GbE IntraStor and 2GbE StorStac appliances and offers as much as 180TB of storage capacity. The IntraStor and 2GbE StorStac offer throughput of 440MB/sec and 880MB/sec, respectively; the 10GbE StorStac offers more than triple these speeds, performing at 3,000MB/sec.

Dr. Douglas Gibbs, pathology bioinformatics manager at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, beta tested Intransa's 10GbE appliance.

"We had a couple of applications that needed higher bandwidth," Gibbs says. "We started doing throughput testing of large file, single copy volumes, and with the Intransa PCU100, we got better throughput up to 750MB/sec."

The StorStac PCU100 appliance is designed for digital content and streaming data applications, including video on-demand, IPTV, digital imaging, video surveillance and data mining. It supports from 16 to 240 disk drives per system and a cache size of 4GB. It can be used standalone with disks from Intransa or be combined with disks from other vendors. It uses Neterion's Xframe 10GigE iSCSI adapter.

The appliance is managed with Intransa's StorManager Suite software, which supports both a graphical user and command line interface. It supports RAID 0, 1, 6 and 10. Like Intransa's other appliances, the 10GbE StorStac supports Windows, Linux, Unix and VMware host computers and works with data-protection software from Veritas, Bakbone, CommVault, Sonasoft, Asempra and emBoot.

Intransa claims that its PCU100 is the first 10GbE storage appliance. It competes with SANRAD's V-Switch and LeftHand Network Storage Modules.

The appliance is expected to be available the first half of this year. The PCU100 with 4TB of disk space costs $US76,400.