Oakdale, MN, December 11, 2006—Small Tree Communications, the high-speed interconnect leader for Apple Mac OS X, has today significantly expanded its product portfolio with the addition of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) storage products. AoE is a standard technology based on a very simple specification that has been developed and tested well in the Linux marketplace. The new products come with a choice of pre-configured JBOD and RAID 0,1,5,10 options and a Mac-like management GUI that allows them to plug-and-play out of the box.
“The real benefit for our customers lies in the striped performance that can be achieved across multiple Gigabit Ethernet links between clients and servers,” said Steve Modica, Small Tree’s Chief Technical Officer. “Today, people buy our multi-port Gigabit Ethernet cards to increase the aggregate bandwidth between their shared storage server and their network switch, but in many cases what they really want is to get striped Gigabit performance between their client Macs and the shared storage. AoE is the first technology available to Mac users that allows sustained performance in the 150-300MB/s range at a reasonable cost.”
Small Tree is now able to provide a complete portfolio of NICs, switches and RAID product to video, audio and post processing customers who want to add shared storage to their Mac OS X workstations. AoE allows Xserve, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, iMac and MacBook users to share storage arrays on a dedicated network along with legacy PowerPC based systems.
“With AoE there is no requirement for a server, which has typically been a performance bottleneck for customers who want to stream HD video to several clients at the same time,” said Derek Robb, Small Tree Vice-President of Sales and Business Development. “Removing the server and all the fibre channel technology from the solution makes it much more affordable and manageable for the average Mac customer.”
An entry level AOE-SR420 four drive AoE unit with 1TB capacity has a list price of $3,587 and the Mac first AOE-SR1520T 15 drive unit with 11.25TB capacity has a list price of $14,499. The products are available for shipment now.
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