Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

ESG NAMES AMCC NO-REBOOT HBA DRIVER 'A SMART BET'

Enterprise Storage Group (ESG), a leading storage research firm, has recognized Applied Micro Circuits Corp for its Fibre Channel (FC) No-Reboot HBA Driver in a recent report, describing the product as a "significant competitive advantage" in the FC HBA market.

"AMCC has a unique and extremely useful technology that can save time, money and weekends for Solaris system administrators," said ESG Senior Analyst Tony Asaro, referring to AMCC's No-Reboot HBA in the report. "In a mature market like FC HBAs, having an innovative and competitive advantage that actually solves a major headache is hard to accomplish. AMCC has that with its No-Reboot FC Driver for Solaris."

AMCC's No-Reboot HBA Driver capability enables users to change HBA parameters without ever having to reboot the server, saving valuable time and money. With LUN discovery and mapping, auto topology detection and auto negotiation features, it enables users to simply install and configure the HBA to optimize storage network performance. Available for Sun Solaris and Windows operating systems, the No-Reboot PCI-X HBA features full backwards compatibility to 32-bit PCI.

According to ESG, the key benefits of eliminating reboots for storage provisioning include:

• Cutting the need for IT staff working off hours and weekends.
• Reducing the number of steps when provisioning storage.
• Reducing the number of configuration file errors.
• Increasing application availability by decreasing the number of planned reboots.
• Preventing reduced application performance that occurs when one node of a server group is taken offline for a reboot.

"AMCC is giving IT administrators their weekends back with the No-Reboot HBA," said Asaro. "This, in itself, is a valuable proposition to corporations that are constantly looking for ways to overcome the challenge of doing more with less. The cost savings can be substantial by eliminating overtime shifts, lost productivity and getting better efficiencies from your storage assets. As the only player in the industry offering such functionality, AMCC is clearly demonstrating innovation in this marketplace."

An AMCC Fortune 1000 customer, who currently has more than 240 Solaris servers and previously required reboots on 10-12 servers a week, has eliminated 20-24 weekend shifts per year after installing the AMCC No-Reboot technology. IT managers can estimate their potential ROI savings by using the No-Reboot ROI Savings Calculator at www.amcc.com/NoRebootDriver/.

"We're thrilled that ESG decided to take a deeper look at our No-Reboot capabilities and, as a result, recognized the true value this product delivers to users," said Brent Little, senior vice president and general manager of AMCC's Storage Business Unit. "As proven through this report and our recent acquisitions of JNI, 3ware and IBM's PowerPC 400 series product line, AMCC is dedicated to becoming a leader in storage."