Introduction

Over time all things change, usually for the better. At one point the horse and buggy was the primary means of transportation, but with the invention of the horseless carriage travel by horse become less and less prevelant. Today you can ride a horse for recreation and almost any old-west landmark site will have a horse and buggy ride where they explain the history of the area and it's more interesting people.

The same is true with storage. Promise storage solutions started with the first IDE RAID card for the ISA bus in 2001 and in 2005 Promise introduced it's first storage subsystem, the M200 which came in form factors for 12 or 15 drives and supported RAID levels 0/1/1e/10/5/6 and 50.

Over the years Promise storage solutions have been favored for popular SAN solutions like XSAN.

Many who have gone the XSAN route have had a decade of service, but with the lessened support for XSAN and the improved storage and storage interfaces of today many are looking to migrate to a newer storage solution.

Migration Paths

Ex10/Ex30

For those with an Ex10 or Ex30 SAN, the Ex50 is the latest in the product line. The Ex50 has 16Gb Fibre Channel, 12Gb SAS for drives and in the backend, more memory and supports larger drives.

E5800 datasheet.

A-class/XSAN

There are several possible migration paths for the A-class and XSAN.

For those requiring large storage and full redundancy, the Vess R3600 and VTrak D5800 is the obvious migration path. The Vess R3600 and VTrak D5800 both support 10Gbe for NAS or iSCSI, 12Gb SAS for drives and all interconnects, and 16Gb fibre channel for those selecting the FC SKU.

Vess R3600 Datasheet

VTrak D5800 Datasheet

For those requiring less storage, the Pegasus Pro comes in 8 and 16  drive SKUs. The Pegasus Pro is single controller and single power supply, but offers 10Gbe for NAS.

Pegasus Pro datasheet

Pegasus 1/2/3

For Pegasus users the latest Pegasus is the Pegasus 32, supporting both USB 3 and Thunderbolt 3. Also available is the Pegasus M4 with 4 SSDs and Pegasus R12, supporting Thunderbolt 4.

Pegasus 32 datasheet

Pegasus M4 datasheet

Pegasus R12 datasheet

Product Comparison

Product drives Migrate to drives DAS NAS iSCSI controllers power supplies
Pegasus 1/2/3 2, 4 or 8 Pegasus 32/Pegasus M4/Pegasus R12 2, 4 or 8 x     1 1
SmartStor 2 or 4 PegasusPro / VTrak N1616 8 or 16 x x x 1 1 or 2
Ex10/Ex30 16 / 24 Ex50 16 or 24 x     2 2
Vess R2600 16 Vess R3600/D5800 16 / 24 x x x 2 2 or 3
A-class / XSAN 24 Vess R3600/D5800 16 / 24 x x x 2 2

Notes:

  1. Pegasus Pro R8 has 1 power supply, the Pegasus Pro R16 / VTrak N1616 has 1 or optionally 2 power supplies
  2. The Vess R2600 has 3 power supplies with a 4th optional
  3. Fibre Channel products are DAS, the Vess R2600/R3600 and D5800 have SKUs with FC
  4. XSANs were often built with the 16-drive Ex10
  5. The Pegasus 1/2/3/32 are Thunderbolt 1/2/3/3 connected DAS
  6. The Pegasus Pro supports both Thunderbolt 3 DAS and 10Gbe NAS
  7. The Vess R2600, Vess R3600 and D5800 support 10Gbe for NAS
  8. The Pegasus32 and Pegasus M4 supports USB 3 connections in addition to Thunderbolt 3
  9. Smartstor supports NAS and iSCSI, but not DAS. the Pegasus Pro does not support iSCSI