Adaptec announced that it has topped 10 petabytes in shipments of storage - enough to house five times the data in all U.S. academic research libraries - since entering the market for external storage products over a year ago.

The shipment milestone comes as Adaptec prepares to expand its suite of cost-effective arrays for direct-attached and networked storage with the introduction next week of the Adaptec FS4500DR-AC, a highly scalable, high-availability RAID subsystem. The array combines Fibre Channel scalability with Serial ATA disk drives to give organizations a cost-effective way to expand Fibre Channel infrastructures for storage of reference information such as electronic documents, presentations, email, graphics, CAD/CAM designs and medical images.

The FS4500DR-AC builds on a family of Adaptec external storage subsystems that includes an array for low-cost, easy-to-manage IP SANs and an award-winning application-specific backup appliance.