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| PMC-Sierra's Complete 4Gbit/s Networked Storage Architecture PMC-Sierra, Inc. has announced its latest generation Tachyon Fibre Channel controller, the HPFC-6600 QE4, enabling a new class of networked storage systems. The quad channel 4G Fibre Channel controller with PCI-Express interfaces seamlessly to PMC-Sierra's 4G Fibre Channel loop switch devices, delivering a complete fabric-to-disk-drive solution for enterprise storage systems. In addition, the QE4 can be used with PMC-Sierra's 3G MaxSAS expander switches and SAS/SATA multiplexers to enable cost-optimized tiered storage system architectures. The Tachyon QE4 provides 4 Gbit/s Fibre Channel SAN connectivity for Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA HDD-based storage systems and is fully compatible with existing 2G and 1G networks. The controller interfaces to external CPUs for RAID and customer-specific application processing through an eight-lane native PCI express bus, and provides advanced features to offload external processors and increase system performance. Furthermore, the QE4 provides 4G Fibre Channel hard disk connectivity through assured interoperability with PMC-Sierra's CTS loop switch product family. The Tachyon QE4 supports four channels of 4 Gbit/s data transfer, achieves up to 3.2 Gbit/s throughput and greater than 1.4 million input/output per second (IOPS) performance. The QE4 integrates a host of leading-edge features including: - A native eight-lane PCI-Express bus; - Reducing PCI-Express bus overhead by supporting 4096 TLP sizes; - Multi-DMA to enable system cache mirroring with minimal CPU overhead; - Frame steering for hardware assisted virtualization; - Multi-CPU support to extend processor scalability and to allow special frame handling within a single Fibre Channel port; and - Support for the T-10 Standard "Protection Information" via ADIF (Advanced Data Integrity Field) to ensure complete integrity in the I/O data path. PMC-Sierra provides a Tachyon Software Development Kit (TSDK) that encapsulates the Fibre Channel protocol behind an architected Application Programming Interface (API), managing all chip-specific control of the Tachyon devices. This software, including sample drivers, allows users to focus their engineering resources on system-level software development, significantly improving time to market. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Networking News :: home page |