Acer Brings AS2040 and AMS 2000 Storage Systems To Enterprise

Acer may be more of a household name due to their consumer lineups, but the company has a hand in the enterprise sector as well. This week, they're extending their U.S. service and storage offerings with the AS2040 and AMS 2000 storage systems. Both of them are being introduced in conjunction with Hitachi Data Systems, and networking connectivity solutions from QLogic are also being touted.

The storage systems are tightly integrated with Acer's server solutions, and are designed to help customers manage escalating storage growth while optimizing data security and availability for Microsoft Exchange Server, VMware, databases and other strategic business applications. The Acer Hitachi AS2040 storage arrays support up to 180TB of data using multiple RAID levels, and comprehensive data security capabilities. The AS2040 provides enterprise-class performance and data availability through a symmetric active-active architecture that allows for effortless data management. Load balancing logic monitors controller workloads, ensuring optimum performance with minimum effort. Users can configure systems with mixed tiers of SAS and SATA drives, and the SAS backend design provides switch point-to-point connectivity to disk drives, and support for more than 2,000 logical volumes. Data availability is further maximized through on-line microcode updates and redundant, hot-swappable spares.

The Acer Hitachi AMS 2000 family includes the AMS 2100 and AMS 2300 systems. The AMS 2100 system supports up to 512 virtual server ports and scalable capacity up to 236 terabytes, while the AMS 2300 supports up to 2048 virtual server ports and 472 terabytes of capacity. The Hi-Track® Remote Monitoring system provides round-the-clock system diagnostics, and Hitachi TrueCopy Remote Replication software provides a continuous, non-disruptive, host-independent remote data replication solution for disaster recovery, data retention or data migration over any distance. All three storage systems also offer Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software (thin provisioning), which delivers "virtual storage capacity," eliminating application service interruptions, reducing costs and simplifying administration.

MSRP depends on configuration and base configurations (five hard drives), and begins at $11,699 for the Acer Hitachi AS2040 storage array, $18,499 for the Acer Hitachi AMS 2100 storage array, and $31,499 for the Acer Hitachi AMS 2300 storage array. Like Acer's companion server line, all Acer and jointly-branded Acer Hitachi storage products are available exclusively through indirect sales channels.