Rorke Data (http://www.rorke.com), a data storage solutions provider,
has released the Galaxy Aurora LS (LiteSpeed) direct-attached RAID
and SAN appliance. It’s designed with four 8Gbit Fibre Channel host
connections and boasts sustained transfer rates of over 1000
MB/second and rebuild times up to 6X faster than hardware-based RAID
solutions.

It supports multiple uncompressed HD streams or 2K film, making it
ideal for the film or video post production industries. According to
Robert Herzan, REOS, Aurora’s patent pending software RAID engine,
further distinguishes the Galaxy Aurora family from the competition’s
traditional RAID offerings by eliminating the biggest bandwidth
bottleneck — the ASIC based hardware RAID controller.

The EOS RAID engine is powered by a Nehalem-based CPU driving a
multi-core software RAID algorithm. Unlike hardware RAID ASICs, EOS
can be quickly reprogrammed to take advantage of next-generation
faster CPUs and more efficient network protocols as they become
available in the market, Herzan says.

The 12-Bay Galaxy Aurora LS features 1, 2 or 4 ports of 8Gbit Fibre
Channel connectivity, can be configured as a Direct Attached or SAN
appliance and offers 10-15 TB of usable storage capacity with RAID 6
protection. An embedded, Web-based GUI allows users to easily monitor
status and troubleshoot. Able to support multiple workstations in a
SAN without expensive switches, the Galaxy Aurora LS is compatible
with SAN software including; XSAN, CommandSoft, StorNext, and MetaSAN
and is application tested with AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, Bluefish,
Final Cut Pro, AVID, Adobe, DaVinci, Autodesk, IRIDAS, Assimilate,
and Digital Vision with more to follow.