Lmhr
10-01-2006, 11:23 PM
Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA, all in one chip
By Bryan Betts
Published Sunday 1st October 2006 06:02 GMT
Storage consolidation and tiering could get a boost with Emulex's development of a chip that supports all three of the current disk drive favourites - SATA, SAS and Fibre Channel, plus RAID 5 or 6.
The company claimed that its IOP 502M chip should bring cheaper storage arrays, and allow today's SANs, most of which are Fibre Channel-based, to make greater use of new SAS and SATA technology.
"People want to re-use the millions they've invested in Fibre Channel," said Brian Reed, Emulex's business development veep.
He said that while there is technology to natively attach SATA drives to Fibre Channel - such as the bridging chips that Emulex is purchasing Sierra Logic for - adopting SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) as well requires new arrays and other infrastructure.
SAS is attractive because it's backwards-compatible with SATA, so you can buy one array and then mix and match the drives in it for tiered storage. That's where the IOP 502M should score, as the first triple-spec chip, Reed claimed.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/01/emulex_3way_chip/
By Bryan Betts
Published Sunday 1st October 2006 06:02 GMT
Storage consolidation and tiering could get a boost with Emulex's development of a chip that supports all three of the current disk drive favourites - SATA, SAS and Fibre Channel, plus RAID 5 or 6.
The company claimed that its IOP 502M chip should bring cheaper storage arrays, and allow today's SANs, most of which are Fibre Channel-based, to make greater use of new SAS and SATA technology.
"People want to re-use the millions they've invested in Fibre Channel," said Brian Reed, Emulex's business development veep.
He said that while there is technology to natively attach SATA drives to Fibre Channel - such as the bridging chips that Emulex is purchasing Sierra Logic for - adopting SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) as well requires new arrays and other infrastructure.
SAS is attractive because it's backwards-compatible with SATA, so you can buy one array and then mix and match the drives in it for tiered storage. That's where the IOP 502M should score, as the first triple-spec chip, Reed claimed.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/01/emulex_3way_chip/