ATTO Technology, Inc., a global leader of storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions for data-intensive computing environments, today unveiled the industry’s most innovative line of SAS/SATA RAID Adapters, providing flexible SAS and SATA II connectivity while delivering blazing-fast 3-Gb/sec. per port performance for IT and digital media users requiring the highest performance SAS RAID solutions.
ATTO’s new ExpressSAS RAID adapters are the industry’s first products with a true low-profile form factor that fit standard-length PCI Express slots, making them ideal for compact and blade server applications where real estate is at a premium, and are the only SAS RAID adapters with hardware RAID 6 and RAID 60 support, protecting valuable customer data against dual drive failures. The ExpressSAS products offer user selectable port configuration options, enabling customers to select the optimal mix of internal and external SAS connections. In addition to supporting Windows and Linux platforms, the ExpressSAS adapters are the only SAS RAID controllers that support Mac ® OS X, including Intel-based Macs, bringing the high performance and value of SAS storage technology to Mac-based digital media customers.

"ATTO has a proven history of exceeding end-user expectations by developing leading-edge products that result in high-performance solutions, such as the Facilis Terrablock line of products,” said James McKenna, vice president, sales and marketing with Facilis Technology.
“Our experience with ATTO products makes the new ExpressSAS RAID adapter a very encouraging development."

These new RAID controllers leverage the power of ATTO’s customer-proven high-performance RAID technology ‘ including the company’s proprietary Advanced Data Streaming (ADS™) Technology that alleviates data transfer bottlenecks ‘ and the new 800MHz PCIe Intel ® IOP348 I/O Processors with integrated high-performance XScale ® technology to meet the most demanding performance requirements of data-intensive applications, including transactional databases, email servers, large server farms and digital media.

"ATTO is bringing more flexible design capabilities to OEMs targeting the emerging SAS/SATA market with its high-performance ExpressSAS RAID controller adapter for bandwidth intensive IT and digital video applications," said Greg Schulz, senior analyst with The StorageIO Group. "This new offering provides leading SAS/SATA performance for bandwidth intensive applications in a small form factor design while offering flexibility in terms of port configuration, RAID and host platform support including Mac ® OS X."

“The ExpressSAS RAID adapters are the embodiment of ATTO’s 18 years of experience with SCSI hardware and our demonstrated success at producing storage connectivity solutions for performance-oriented customers who look to ATTO as a trusted industry leader," said Ed Tierney, director of marketing at ATTO Technology. "Today’s announcement demonstrates that same commitment to the SAS RAID market with innovative products that address the high-performance storage needs of customers across the Windows ®, Linux and Mac ® OS X platforms.”

Featuring advanced fault-tolerant features that include hot swap, hot spares, online capacity expansion, battery back-up, and optimized disk utilization for SAS drives, SATA II drives, or any combination of the two, the ATTO ExpressSAS R348 and R380 adapters deliver an intelligent and robust low-profile RAID solution. The SAS and SATA II support make it easy to create cost-effective multi-tiered storage solutions in a single cabinet, utilizing cost-correct SATA drives for secondary storage while staging critical primary data on higher-performance SAS disks. These adapters will support standard RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 and features ATTO’s exclusive DVRAID, making them capable of handling the most demanding applications such as 2K and 4K film, multiple layers of complex, uncompressed real-time effects, and high-definition video editing.

The ATTO ExpressSAS RAID Adapters combine x8 PCI Express technology and SAS speeds for high-performance server environments and applications. SAS is the next generation SCSI interface that delivers significant improvements in scalability, performance, reliability, and flexibility over parallel SCSI by leveraging a serial architecture for data transport. PCI Express is a low-cost, highly scalable serial technology that delivers added performance by increasing the
I/O capacity while eliminating bus contention. This allows for faster and more efficient performance with reduced I/O bottlenecks.

ATTO’s new ExpressSAS RAID controllers are currently available for customer evaluation with general availability in Q1 2007. Single unit MSRP is $1095.

www.attotech.com