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October 2005
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Concurrent Technologies announces one of the first PMC based, quad port,
serial attached disk-storage adaptors suitable for CompactPCI® or VME
platforms. The SC PMC/SA1 is a single size PMC card that provides four
independent Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and/or Serial ATA (SATA) ports
utilizing the LSI Logic® LSISAS1064 serial drive controller. Serial
drive controllers that provide SAS are capable of data transfer rates of
up to 3Gbits/s per interface whilst leveraging existing SCSI protocols.
The result is a higher-performance interface with reduced software
development resulting in reduced system integration time. The SC PMC/SA1
enables SCSI interface solutions beyond the performance and capability
offered by Ultra-320 systems to the next-generation Direct Attach
Storage (DAS) enterprise servers and high-performance storage networks
while retaining device-level backward compatibility. Supporting a range
of popular operating systems, the SC PMC/SA1 is suitable for storage
applications such as server systems, distributed computing,
video-on-demand or image/signal processing.
The
SAS physical layer is compatible with SATA and enables the SC PMC/SA1 to
support serial link connections for up to four SAS 1.0 or four SATA 1.0a
compatible hard disk drives, or a combination of both interfaces. Each
link can operate at either 1.5Gbit/s or 3Gbits/s. The SC PMC/SA1
supports all serial attached device protocols such as SSP, SMP, STP,
SATA and supports 2, 3 and 4 lane SAS wide port configurations. Up to
122 devices can be addressed when drive expanders are used. In addition
support for integrated mirroring and striping RAID options are
supported. The LSI controller utilizes the ARM926 RISC processor core
that off-loads the host-board-processor by, managing I/O cycles and
utilizing LSI’s Fusion-MPT™ (Message Passing Technology) architecture.
The
SC PMC/SA1 provides access to the four SAS physical interfaces via an
SFF 8484 4i multilane connector on the front panel. The PMC PCI
interface supports 32/64-bit 33/66MHz PCI busses and is compatible with
3.3V PCI signaling. The SC PMC/SA1 can be used with any board level
product featuring a standard PMC host interface, including Concurrent
Technologies' CompactPCI or VME based PMC host-board processors.
The
SC PMC/SA1 is fitted with 2Mbytes Flash EPROM, pre-programmed with the
LSI PC BIOS and on-board configuration utility plus 32Kbytes of NVRAM
for configuration data and nonvolatile RAID information. This allows,
for example, the SC PMC/SA1 to be configured to boot the operating
system via the SAS interface. For ease of integration, many of today’s
leading operating systems are supported including Linux®, Windows® 2000,
Windows® Server 2003 and Windows® XP. |