Mezzanine card upgrades to serial-attached storage

Concurrent Technologies has released one of the first PMC-based quad-port serial attached disk-storage adapters suitable for CompactPCI or VME platforms.

Concurrent Technologies has released one of the first PMC-based quad-port serial attached disk-storage adapters 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 using the LSI Logic LSISAS1064 serial drive controller.

Serial drive controllers that provide SAS are capable of data transfer rates of up to 3Gbit/s per interface while 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 1.5 or 3Gbit/s.

The SC PMC/SA1 supports all serial attached device protocols such as SSP, SMP, STP, SATA and supports two-, three and four-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 uses the ARM926 RISC processor core that offloads the host-board-processor by managing I/O cycles and using 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 32/64bit 33/66MHz PCIbuses and is compatible with 3.3V PCI signalling.

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 2Mbyte Flash EPROM, preprogrammed with the LSI PC BIOS and onboard configuration utility plus 32Kbyte 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.

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