Features - Storage Innovations:

iVivity ANNOUNCES iDiSX ARCHITECTURE

iVivity, a leading technology provider for storage networking systems, announced its iDiSX architecture that will be used to launch a series of revolutionary storage network processors into the market beginning in 2004. The groundbreaking architecture, developed over the last three years, allows storage applications to exercise unprecedented control over storage I/O streams at wire-speed performance.

"iVivity is combining the complexities associated with data management, storage I/O and data networking into a tightly integrated silicon solution," said Dave Coombs, president and CEO of iVivity. "This breakthrough architecture enables the development of new applications which will significantly advance innovation in storage management systems. We have already secured one design win with a major storage OEM and are collaborating on opportunities with a host of prospective customers."

"We believe that iVivity is leading the way in developing core technology that can be used by the industry to make storage networks more friendly and accessible and have a major impact on the infrastructure of the future Data Center," said Arun Taneja, president, founder and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group.

"Not having control over I/O streams in silicon has slowed innovation and is one of the major reasons why storage management costs remain high," said Zulfiqar Qazilbash, chief strategy officer of iVivity. "iVivity has developed a flexible element that allows OEMs unprecedented control over storage I/O streams -- enabling the highest levels of performance and functionality without sacrificing product differentiation."

iVivity's iDiSX based components can terminate and initiate I/O streams for all SCSI based protocols (including iSCSI and FCP) and facilitate application controlled I/O switching at a 10Gbps line rate. The architecture achieves unprecedented I/O performance by exercising a high degree of parallelism in the I/O path. The I/O is pipelined into three separate stages: I/O termination, application controlled payload processing and I/O initiation. It is designed to perform complete data-path processing entirely in hardware, without processor intervention, resulting in the lowest possible latencies. Exceptions are handled by on-chip micro-engines, an on-chip RISC based RTOS environment or an external processor.

Complete control is achieved via a rich set of APIs that allow an OEM application to configure the I/O path and make real-time changes in the I/O stream at extremely low latencies, resulting in very high IOPS performance.

Designed for 10Gb per second, the architecture can cost effectively be used to manage multiple 1Gb per second iSCSI or 2 to 4 Gb per second FCP streams. The solution has extensive programming capabilities to accommodate OEM customization requirements and -- unlike solutions by other vendors attempting to enter this market -- the I/O path is state machine based for highest performance. In addition, iDiSX has highly sophisticated data management capabilities. The component is flexible and can be used anywhere in the network including switch, appliance, router, gateway, array and server blades.