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PMC-Sierra Introduces Fiber Channel Protocol Controller

Posted on: Monday, 10 December 2007, 12:00 CST

California-based fabless semiconductor company PMC-Sierra has introduced the PM8032 Tachyon QE8 Fiber Channel protocol controller.

According to the company, Tachyon QE8 addresses the new applications such as storage networks with 8Gbit/s connectivity to remove bandwidth bottlenecks created by data consolidation through virtualization and the explosion in Web 2.0 fixed content storage.

It is fully interoperable with PMC-Sierra's family of 4Gbit/s Fiber Channel products and can also be combined with its SAS/SATA protocol controllers and expanders enabling customers to deliver high-performance, tiered-storage system solutions, the company claimed.

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 has features such as 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 and multi-CPU support, the company said.

"Fiber 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 enterprise storage division at PMC-Sierra. "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."

PMC-Sierra provides a Tachyon Software Development Kit (TSDK) that encapsulates the Fiber Channel protocol behind an architected application programming interface (API). This interface across all Tachyon devices simplifies management of all chip-specific controls according ot the company. Also the Tachyon Transport Independent Software Architecture (TISA) enables OEMs to leverage software development across PMC-Sierra's Fiber Channel and SAS/SATA products.

The PM8032 Tachyon QE8 device will be available in first quarter of 2008 in a lead-free 480-pin flip chip-plastic ball grid array package using 90nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology.

Recently, the company launched multi-service fiber access gateway device, the MSP7160, which enable carriers to expand high defination video service offerings to consumers through the mass deployment of high bandwidth broadband, and support necessary enhancements to applications such as video and picture sharing, P2P, and data storage.

Source: ComputerWire daily updates

Source: Datamonitor

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