Features - Storage Innovations:

INFORTREND UNVEILS NEW RAID ENGINE, ADVANCED GUI

At Computex Infortrend unveiled its newest RAID engine, its fourth generation application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that runs at 266MHz and more than doubles the performance for its EonStor Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) RAID subsystem product lines.

The IFT-500266 RAID engine ASIC is at the heart of several next generation Fibre and SATA-II RAID controller and subsystem architecture designs that will be demonstrated at the Infortrend booth. The SATA-II designs will support Native Command Queuing and 3Gb speeds when those features are available from hard drive manufacturers. Also on display will be RAIDWatch 2.0, a vastly improved graphical user interface (GUI) for its EonStor RAID arrays, providing much easier configuration, management and more powerful functionality. In separate news today, Infortrend is announcing availability this month for RAIDWatch 2.0.

In preliminary performance tests, Infortrend's new RAID architecture design generated a sustained data transfer rate of approximately 370MB per second Writes under RAID 5 configuration. This represents an almost 100 percent increase over current generation RAID controllers on the market.

"This new technology is an essential building block in delivering state-of-the-art designs to stay ahead of unrelenting market demands for increased bandwidth," said Alan Wang, director of product development for Infortrend. "Additionally, the 500266 DDR design will result in products with even greater price/performance for our OEMs, systems integrators and end users."

Infortrend's product enhancement comes at a time when data-intensive applications such as digital video and disk-to-disk backup are pushing the limits of available bandwidth. The IFT-500266 DDR ASIC is paired with the IBM PowerPC 750FX CPU, DDR memory and PCI-X bus interface for the company's new controller designs. The ASIC has highly-integrated peripheral circuitry, doubling the bandwidth up to 2GB per second each. The dedicated FIFO provides high throughput PCI and CPU data transfer. The ASIC also boasts low power consumption and low heat dissipation. It can support dual CPUs.

"Infortrend's RAID controller paired with IBM's 750FX is another strong example of how customers are able to create and customize new products, reaping the benefits of the Power Architecture," stated Mark Ireland, manager of PowerPC, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "The Power Architecture is enabling customers, like Infortrend, to enhance their capabilities and the performance of their products."