eNEWSLETTER SIGNUP
Sign up for our free
Industry eNewsletters
Q+A CENTER
Latest question:
How do you think the new GigE standards will influence the machine vision industry?
Respond or ask your question now!
Industry News
Most Read
Most E-mailed
E-mail Article
Print Article
PMC-Sierra Announces Quad 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel Controller for High-Performance Storage Systems
Business Editors/Technology Writers
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--December 10, 2007--PMC-Sierra, Inc. (Nasdaq:PMCS) today announced the PM8032 Tachyon® QE8 Fibre Channel protocol controller to enable a new class of networked storage systems. Storage networks are moving to 8Gbit/s connectivity to remove bandwidth bottlenecks created by data consolidation through virtualization and the explosion in Web 2.0 fixed content storage. PMC-Sierra’ s Tachyon QE8 specifically addresses these new applications and system requirements by doubling the performance of existing solutions and adding a host of advanced features, including PCI-Express 2.0 Gen-II, Multiple Outbound Read Requests and advanced 8Gbit/s serial link monitoring. The Tachyon QE8 is fully interoperable with PMC-Sierra’ s family of 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel products, enabling the industry’ s leading storage OEMs to increase performance, decrease power and preserve years of software investment. The Tachyon QE8 can also be combined with PMC-Sierra’ s industry-leading SAS/SATA protocol controllers and expanders to enable our customers to deliver a broad range of high-performance, tiered-storage system solutions (Figure 1).
“Fibre Channel is the industry mainstay of storage-area networking infrastructure and the emergence of virtualization is accelerating SAN adoption at an unprecedented rate,” said Mark Stibitz, vice president and general manager of PMC-Sierra’ s Enterprise Storage Division. “PMC-Sierra worked closely with the industry’ s leading storage OEMs to deliver an 8Gbit/s solution that exceeds the performance and advanced feature requirements for their next-generation storage networks.”
The Tachyon QE8 combines four ports of 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel with eight lanes of 5Gbit/s PCIe 2.0 bandwidth, enabling unsurpassed levels of performance for networked storage (see Figure 2). In addition, the QE8 leverages an industry-proven Tachyon State Machine architecture that combines low latency with a high level of system performance and scalability. PMC-Sierra provides a comprehensive Tachyon Software Development kit (TSDK), including source code and drivers, to significantly reduce firmware development time and accelerate time to market.
The Tachyon QE8 supports four channels of 8Gbit/s data transfer, achieves up to 6.4GByte/s throughput and greater than 1.4 million I/Os per second (IOPS) performance. The QE8 integrates a host of advance features, including:
Native eight-lane PCI-Express 2.0 Gen-II 5Gbit/s bus;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;Support for the T-10 Standard “Protection Information” via ADIF (Advanced Data Integrity Field) to ensure complete integrity in the I/O data path;State Machine architecture for lowest latency, highest performance with the lowest power requirements: approximately 2W per channel;Industry-standard N_PortID Virtualization;PMC-Sierra’ s advanced 8Gbit/s SERDES features for enhanced debugging and troubleshooting, reducing system qualification times; andMultiple outstanding PCI-Express request technology to optimize PCI-Express bus utilization, especially for systems with long memory latencies.
