At the International Consumer Electronics Show 2013 (CES13) I stopped by the Other World Computing (OWC) booth. OWC is best known for its lines of Mac upgrades and accessories. Founded in 1988 OWC is a well known brand in the Apple ecosystem. Lately, it has expanded into areas such as selling solid state drive upgrades for Apple MacBooks, even before MacBooks commonly had solid state drives.
OWC is now producing its own line of solid state drives and PCIe SSDs. One of the first things that caught my eye in their booth was sitting under the glass and was the OWC Mercury Accelsior. It is a PCIe SSD offering from OWC.
On the other end of the size spectrum was a rackmount setup that held the OWC Jupiter storage system. I still remember in the 90’s when OWC released a then huge 60GB external Firewire drive. Suffice to say this is a much larger system.
OWC is using LSI’s SAS switching technology to provide a fast backbone that is easier to setup and less costly than a traditional optical setup. As can be seen in the first picture, prices range from $7,299 to $26,699 depending on the drive configuration. One can see different sized disk shelves but the center of the array is interesting.
Also on display was a pre-production tower storage variant of the OWC Jupiter SAS system.
Overall it was great seeing OWC about 25 years after its founding expanding into new frontiers. I will admit that I did not envision that OWC would be building large scale storage systems like this back in the 1990’s, but it is great to see that they are doing so and also utilizing the LSI SAS switching technology which provides massive bandwidth in their setup.
Nice pic. Wonder if the Jupiter will take off.