Expansion for Serial Attached SCSI storage: News from Vitesse Semiconductor

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Vitesse Semiconductor Corp has extended its widely adopted NexSAS line of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expanders with the introduction of VSC7156 24-PHY, VSC7157 36-PHY and VSC7158 18-PHY enhanced SAS expanders. These new devices deliver enhanced enterprise capabilities including standard PHY and address-resolved zoning a multi-affiliation STP/SATA bridge, integrated Ethernet MACs, and others desired by OEMs. Designed for enterprise server and enclosure applications, the new expanders provide OEMs with superior performance and flexibility to meet their architecture needs.

The new Generation II NexSAS expanders provide OEMs with more integrated, higher-functioning storage silicon solutions as compared with current offerings for the SAS market.

Bridging the gap between the SAS 1.1 and planned SAS 2.0 specifications, these new features raise the bar on both functional integration and price/performance for today's SAS market.

The products phy and address-resolved zoning meet the T10 working group of INCTS under accreditation of ANSI requirements.

SAS is the evolutionary replacement for parallel SCSI and supports diverse applications in enterprise storage including JBODs, NAS, RAID subsystems, mid-line and near-line storage facilities, and fixed-content storage systems.

According to IDC, SAS will quickly capture share in the enterprise hard-disk-drive (HDD) market, growing from 0% in 2003 to over 35% of all HDD shipments in 2008.

IDC also predicts that over 40% of all enterprise SATA HDDs will attach to SAS infrastructures by 2008.

'Leveraging the tremendous success we experienced with our first generation offerings, Vitesse continues to dominate the majority of Tier-1 expander sockets by being the first offer advanced features in expander products', said Sam Barnett, Programme Director of SAS and SATA Solutions at Vitesse.

'Vitesse's storage IC solutions will continue to lead the industry by shaping the development and deployment of SAS as the serial storage architecture of choice'.

Building on 20 years of high-speed input/output innovation, the VSC7156/57/58 NexSAS expanders incorporate the latest Vitesse high-performance I/O technologies, including dynamic multilevel equalisation, programmable edge rate control, as well as multiple levels of output de-emphasis once applied only to long haul products.

These unique features allow customisation of signalling on a per PHY basis in support of both 'in- and out-of-the-box' applications (ie shelf-to-shelf, rack-to-rack, across the room, or within a data centre).

Key to product scalability and flexibility across a wide variety of system platforms is the inclusion of a new embedded 32bit RISC CPU, which brings performance-oriented enclosure management (EM) functions directly onto the expander.

Two adjunct processing engines in the EM subsystem support custom SSP and STP initiator and target functions and augment traditional EM services to give unprecedented levels of control to both the system OEM and end-user.

The entire NexSAS family is based on a common software and hardware architecture allowing OEMs to easily scale designs across port densities, functional requirements, and applications while leveraging existing software and firmware.

This architectural flexibility provides OEMs with accelerated time to market and maximised time in market through reuse of designs and firmware/software.

The VSC7156, VSC7157 and VSC7158 are priced between $31.00 and $63.00 in volume and are sampling today.

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Expansion for Serial Attached SCSI storage

Vitesse Semiconductor Corp has extended its widely adopted NexSAS line of Serial Attached SCSI expanders.