Emulex shatters drive support glass ceiling

Emulex has introduced a new family of embedded storage switches that smash the 126 device barrier, allowing thousands of disk drives to be attached to storage controllers without adding complexity.

The FibreSpy SOC 804 switch-on-a-chip is available with two applications: the SuperScalar Tiered Storage (804S) which enables thousands of Fibre Channel disk drives with various capabilities to be interconnected within a tiered storage array, providing greatly enhanced scalability cost effectively, and the and the Integrated SAN Switch (804E) solutions, which enables SAN switching to be integrated into the front-end of storage systems and server blades.

Both FibreSpy solutions integrate with Emulex's InSpeed management technology.

The FibreSpy SOC 804 enables embedded storage solutions with four speed agile Fibre Channel ports (4 Gb/s, 2 Gb/s or 1 Gb/s) and a high-speed SPI-4.2 interface that serves as an inter-switch link to connect multiple FibreSpy devices that can be cascaded to create higher port count switch solutions. Also included is an ARM processor and memory that allow a variety of microcode images to meet specific storage system OEM needs.

"As enterprises consolidate their storage assets to boost efficiency and business continuity, they are looking for tiered storage systems with modular form factors, higher levels of scalability, and the ability to support a wide range of hard disk drive options," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research at IDC.

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