ATTO Technology Escalates Digital Video Application Processing Performance up to 75% over Existing Technologies

Internal Benchmarking Reveals Industry Leadership in High Throughput Digital Media Workflow Environments, Including Avid, Apple and Autodesk

May 30, 2007


Amherst, NY (May 30, 2007) -— ATTO Technology, Inc., global leader of storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions for data-intensive computing environments, today announced that internal benchmark testing has proven its ExpressSAS® RAID controllers to be the industry's highest performance Serial Attached SCSI products for digital video editing, production and other data-intensive applications.

Internal testing shows that ATTO ExpressSAS® controllers demonstrate an increase of 50 to 75 percent faster performance than competitive products in a series of bandwidth-stressing benchmark tests, such as running multiple HD video streams with parity protection on Avid Xpress Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, Autodesk Maya and other digital media workflow environments.

Benchmark data highlights
  • Achieved more than 1.5 GB/sec. throughput performance; capable of supporting 4K film applications, or editing multiple streams of 10-bit uncompressed HD video without dropping frames
  • More than 100% better write performance than leading competitor
  • 3X more processing power with built-in latency reducing algorithms prevent dropped frames and increasing productivity

 “The ExpressSAS® product line was created with a special focus on serving the needs of performance-oriented customers and applications. We now have the benchmark data to validate the ExpressSAS® controllers as the industry's premiere performers in SAS RAID technology,” said Ed Tierney, director of marketing at ATTO.

The market-leading performance of ATTO's ExpressSAS® products is the latest chapter in the company's record of leadership in delivering the highest-performance connectivity solutions to the most demanding customers as illustrated with more than 80 percent of Hollywood-produced movies edited on systems using ATTO host adapters.

Tierney credited ATTO's performance advantage to a technically superior design that leverages the latest storage processor technology from Intel and ATTO's customer-proven proprietary technologies that make the ExpressSAS® line the only SAS RAID products optimized for the demands of IT server and digital media workgroup solutions requiring high-bandwidth and data protection, including HD video production, video-on-demand, audio-on-demand and other data-intensive environments.

The ExpressSAS® products are built around Intel's new IOP348 I/O Processor with integrated high-performance XScale® technology, a dual-core storage processor that allows individual processor cores to be dedicated and optimized for SAS protocol processing and RAID algorithms. ATTO's RAID implementation is tuned for streaming data applications and includes exclusive DVRAID™ functionality, enabling the ExpressSAS® controllers to deliver RAID 0-type performance with parity protection, an increasingly critical issue as more digital media productions rely on direct-to-disk recording with no original recording tape as a backup. DVRAID as implemented on the ExpressSAS® supports editing of two uncompressed streams of High Definition (HD) video plus alpha channel titles and 11 streams of real-time, uncompressed Standard Definition (SD) video.  ExpressSAS® RAID controllers also feature ATTO's proprietary Advanced Data Streaming (ADS™) Technology to minimize latency and alleviate data transfer bottlenecks, producing faster, more efficient data movement with reduced CPU utilization.

ATTO's ExpressSAS® RAID adapters are the industry's first and only products with a true low-profile  form factor  that fit standard-length  PCI  Express  slots, making  them ideal  for compact-designed systems where real estate is a premium and for computer-rich systems.  The ExpressSAS® products are also the industry's only low-profile line of adapters offering user- selectable port configuration options for an optimal mix of internal and external SAS connections.

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, ATTO ExpressSAS® R348 and R380 adapters deliver an intelligent and robust low-profile RAID solution.  SAS and SATA II support makes 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.

The ATTO ExpressSAS® RAID Adapters combine x8 PCI Express technology and 3 Gb/sec. 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, more efficient performance with reduced I/O bottlenecks.

Pricing and availability
ATTO's ExpressSAS® RAID controllers are available for purchase with a single unit MSRP of $1095.

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