Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: QuickLogic | Subject: QuickPCI
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 25 July 2002
PCI engine provides speedy SAN solution
Raidtec chose QuickPCI from QuickLogic for the new RAID Offload Engine used to power its next-generation 2Gbit/s storage area network (SAN) controller.
Raidtec chose QuickPCI from QuickLogic for the new RAID Offload Engine used to power its next-generation 2Gbit/s storage area network (SAN) controller QuickPCI was selected for its performance and the strong design support from QuickLogic's engineering team
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 19 Apr 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Raidtec Corp provides advanced storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) hardware and management software for data storage in video, database and enterprise computing environments - all of which demand the highest performance for data throughput and reliability.
Raidtec chose the QL5064-66, a 64bit, 66MHz fully embedded PCI controller with 90K FPGA gates as an SDRAM-PCI+XOR engine for RAID and cache memory management.
The Raidtec design required two independent FIFOs to operate in real time on a PCIbus with two initiators.
In addition, an XOR engine was needed to read SDRAM blocks and generate an XOR product, which is then written back to SDRAM.
The internal SMA controller is used to push data from one PCIbus to other PCI buses.
The main challenge encountered was getting the design to run at the speed required to process 200Mbyte of data every second so as to take full advantage of Raidtec's end-to-end Fibre Channel architecture.
To achieve this, it was necessary to use interconnected library blocks instead of high level VHDL state machine constructs.
"Our design simply didn't work in devices from some manufacturers and others couldn't deliver the required performance", said William Oppermann, director of engineering at Raidtec.
"QuickLogic's QL5064-66 offered us guaranteed and consistent performance as well as a stable PCI block and easy compatibility.
The ease of use features built into QuickLogic's QuickPCI and QuickWorks development toolset along with the proactive support of the applications staff were also important in overcoming the design challenges in the shortest possible time".
Oppermann added, "According to some analysts, the SAN market is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2005.
To achieve success in such a rapidly changing field, we require not only the latest in technology but strong support to get our products to market faster than ever before.
QuickLogic certainly delivered for us".
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