Features - Storage Innovations:

SiliconStor ANNOUNCES TRUE ACTIVE-ACTIVE MULTIPLEXER CHIP

SiliconStor Inc, a provider of storage technology focused on the Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) markets, announced the industry's first true Active-Active Multiplexer chip. SiliconStor's patent-pending AAMUX enables disk array manufacturers to build storage systems using less expensive single ported SATA drives, which can connect directly to existing dual port infrastructures while emulating the high reliability and performance characteristics offered by the higher end Fibre Channel (FC) systems.

"Enterprise IT is looking for low cost solutions for information life-cycle management (ILM), infrastructure ROI, and regulatory compliance initiatives that leverage their existing and fully invested FC SAN infrastructures," said Mike Ofstedahl, president and CEO of SiliconStor. "Our AAMUX technology plays an important role in enabling this trend towards SATA for online and nearline disk arrays, a market that is expected to grow dramatically over the next few years."

SiliconStor also announced that it is working with many Tier One OEMs on their next generation FC-SATA and SAS based array designs, and is currently shipping in production to Dot Hill Systems for its SANnet II SATA solution.

"SiliconStor has the only true AAMUX technology in the market, and with it we were able to design and build the industry's first FC Array with a dual-ported 1.5 Gb/s Serial ATA with active-active loops," said Omar Barraza, director of marketing at Dot Hill Systems Corp, a SiliconStor OEM partner. "Dot Hill is committed to bringing the most cost-effective, high performance SATA solutions to market. The benefit of SiliconStor AAMUX technology to the market is significant -- enabling SATA drives to look and act like the more expensive, high performance Fibre Channel drives."

SiliconStor's AAMUX enables single ported SATA drives to connect like dual active ported drives for use in FC-SATA disk arrays and disk arrays using SAS expanders supporting the SATA tunneling protocol (SAS-STP). Conventional solutions use an active-passive scheme, where only one host port is actually connected to the device port, while the other host port remains on hold in case of a single failover. This mechanism results in an increased complexity to the system software and also takes away from system performance due to latency associated with failover switching.

True active-active dual porting of SATA drives makes both ports available all the time, simultaneously, much like dual-ported Fibre Channel, while system software complexity, manageability, and clustering support are greatly simplified. Additionally, in SAS array systems, where there is a desire to mix and match native SAS drives and SAS-STP drives, dual ported SATA drives become a necessity, hence requiring the AAMUX solution. The net result of moving to a dual-ported active-active SATA drive solution is much higher performance (doubling the available FC bandwidth) and contributes to efficient system design. Most of the disk array manufacturers implement the dual porting of SATA drives through a path controller card that sits between the drive and the disk arrays midplane.

The enterprise class storage array market is mostly served today by dual path FC SANs, which deliver high reliability and availability, but at a cost premium. New federal regulations, like Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, now require companies to maintain auditable, nearline, digital storage accessibility to corporate data. These compliance issues are costly. It is prohibitively expensive to use FC disk array storage for this regulatory archiving need.

"Compliant systems that utilize Serial ATA drives are expected to grow to more than 30 percent of the market in 2007," said Roger Cox, research vice president with Gartner. "This healthy enterprise market for SATA can be attributed to a number of factors, but a primary reason is enterprise IT must adhere to the archival requirements of Sarbannes-Oxley and do it in a cost effective way."

As part of its product development strategy, SiliconStor has partnered with Sierra Logic, to design a path controller reference design that enables array OEMs to design active-active FC to SATA array systems using Sierra Logic's Silicon Storage Router controller technology and SiliconStor's AAMUX technology.

"SiliconStor and Sierra Logic share the same vision for enabling low-cost, high performance enterprise storage solutions. Our Silicon Storage Router and the SiliconStor AAMUX are important building blocks for enabling world class Fibre Channel to SATA disk arrays," said Bob Whitson, CEO of Sierra Logic. "We're seeing a lot of interest from the market for a true Active-Active topology as it provides double the bandwidth into and out of an enclosure as compared to an Active-Passive topology, and with most of the applications for SATA today being very bandwidth-hungry, an Active-Active solution makes perfect sense."