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CalDigit SAN announced at NAB

I just got this in my inbox courtesy of the LAFCPUG mailing list.

Right now at Digital Rebellion we're running Xserve RAIDs on Xsan 1.4. I love these things but they're loud, they kick out a lot of heat and they're no longer being made. They're still pretty good and they're not out of date yet but I have been looking at alternatives with the future in mind.

CalDigit, famous for their hardware RAID cards, demonstrated such an alternative at NAB. One major departure from the Xserve RAIDs and their replacement, the Promise VTrak E-Class, is the fact that it does not use 2 or 4 Gb Fibre Channel cables (which cost around $80 per cable) to transmit data. It uses ePCIe which allows it to transmit data at speeds of up to 20 Gbps and allows for very long cable lengths of up to 300m.

With the recent announcement of the entry-level Scarlet camera, the demand for real-time access to extremely high resolution streams looks set to increase dramatically and, luckily, the CalDigit SAN has the bandwidth to transfer multiple 2K streams in real-time.

Uniquely, there is also an ePCIe ExpressCard device to allow laptop users (MacBook Pro only) to access the SAN. This is not currently available for fibre-based networks.

There's nothing on their site as of yet but they have a press release out and it looks like more details will be announced nearer the shipping date, which is currently unknown. This is definitely something I'm keeping my eye on.