The Raptor EC-16A-SAS features an AMCC PPC440SP CPU, dual 3GB SAS channels, sixteen SAS drive bays, and fully modularized components with hot swappable power supplies and fans to reduce the amount of operating downtime for maintenance. The Raptor EC-16A-SAS series supports RAID 6 to further increase data integrity and reliability. Also featured in the Raptor EC-16A-SAS is an expansion port to attach JBOD expansion units.

The Raptor EC-16A-SAS series features a new innovative array structure that hierarchically organizes storage objects. With this structure, physical drives are combined into Disk Groups (DG). Disk Groups are subdivided into Logical Disks (LD) where arrays are created. Lastly, Logical Disk can be combined or stripped together to form Volumes. Either volumes or LD can be pointed to a LUN which are then presented to the host computer.

Logical Disk (LD) Online Expansion can increase the capacity of an online LUN, instead of having to create a separate partition for unused capacity or capacity gained from Disk Group Expansion; now your storage can dynamically grow as your demands grow. In the event of overestimating requirements for Logical Disk capacity, shrinking can be used reduce the allocated storage of a Logical Disk.

Embedded CGI-based GUI (graphic user interface) management interface can be accessed through a web browser. The GUI allows users to easily setup RAID arrays, lun mapping, etc. and also provides remote monitoring of drive health, fan, and power supplies.

RAID 6 improves over the industry standard RAID 5 by adding another parity disk which gives greater reliability and data protection.

The Raptor EC-16A-SAS series now provides an Array Recovery Utility (ARU) that can aid a user in the event of multiple drive failures corrupting the RAID array of a Logical Disk and/or volumes. The ARU enables users to recover lost disk members of a Disk Group, and will automatically recover Logical Disks and Volumes.

A performance monitoring utility has been designed to the needs of our users. Hard disk drives, controller cache, LUNs, and host ports can be monitored concurrently with extensive detail. These statistics allow users to view current average, accumulated, maximum and minimum of the aforementioned items.

With ongoing research in performance optimization an adaptive pre-read algorithm has been developed that is able to track and recognize IO behaviors that will adjust controller cache accordingly. Pre-read depth and multipliers are adjustable to enable fine tuning for your specific application. Write cache has several options; including cache flush period, write merging, and sorting, that are also user configurable to further fine tune performance.