Taipei, Taiwan, November 25, 2010 -- Areca Technology Corporation (ARECA), a leading provider of internal, external and PCI-X/PCIe SAS or SATA ll RAID controllers with RAID 6 inside, today announced the availability of a new family of ARC-8026 6Gb/s SAS expander controller. SI customers use the controller to build the rack-optimized 6Gb/s SATA and SAS JBOD storage enclosures designed to provide a affordable, highly scalable, high-performance storage solution that enables our customers to expand capacity beyond the server to meet growing data requirements.

The ARC-8026 series expander boards are based on 6Gb/s SAS technology and powered by the LSI SAS2x36 6Gb/s SAS expander controller chip. They support 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s SAS or SATA hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid-state drives (SSDs). Configuration and environmental information is accessible either via in-band or out-of-band serial port. The ARC-8026 series expander boards offer SES2 support for management via in-band SAS SMP protocol.

The ARC-8026 supports up to 24 internal ports and 12 external ports flexibility host /expander port configuration. Each expander board features three external 6Gb/s SAS SFF-8088 connections, providing connectivity for two 4 lanes 6Gb/s SAS host with one 4 lanes 6Gb/s SAS expander or one 4 lanes 6Gb/s SAS host with two 4 lanes 6Gb/s SAS expander for easy expansion. When expander port used with additional JBOD enclosures, the ARC-8026 can provide an ideal solution for enterprise-class storage applications that needs high-bandwidth applications and transaction-intensive applications to offer exceptional performance for NAS, server RAID solutions, supercomputing, near-line backup, security systems, streaming and cloud computing applications.

ARC-8026 series expander boards are fully qualified for using with ARC-1880 6Gb/s SAS RAID adapters and ARC-1320 SAS host adapters with external ports, providing easy connectivity to servers for cost-effective storage expansion and scalability. It provides fault-tolerant links across separate SAS domains. The ARC-8026 expander board can be split into two virtual groups with those RAID or Host adapter ports which directly come from the SAS controller chip for better performance application. In addition to meet different enclosure, ARC-8026 expander box has implemented autonomous chassis management of two power supplies status connectors, four fan monitor/speed control connectors through the SES-2 protocol.