Hifn/Freescale Collaboration Delivers Initial Reference Design for Storage OEMs

Hifn and Freescale Semiconductor announced the first storage reference design resulting from their previously announced technology development collaboration. Cofio Software, Inc. has adopted the reference design and is deploying its ViStor Virtual Tape Library Software to the joint solution.

With the availability of the new reference design, Hifn and Freescale have rapidly delivered on their development partnership announced just last quarter. The design includes Hifn’s best-of-breed Express DR data reduction cards and Freescale’s high-performance MPC8641D PowerQUICC dual core processor to provide storage OEMs, ODMs and systems integrators with a storage-optimized, go-to-market platform for virtual tape libraries, disk-to-disk backup and other critical storage applications. The solution will be highlighted at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando, Fla. on June 16 -19.

“We are excited to achieve this initial milestone with Freescale, but we see this as only the tip of the iceberg for what is possible in this collaborative effort,” said Michael Goldgof, vice president of Product Marketing at Hifn. “The strong synergy in technology and market presence for Hifn and Freescale, along with the applications expertise of Cofio, has the potential to open new storage market opportunities for all of us.”

“The creation of this reference design represents a significant milestone in our joint effort with Hifn to introduce comprehensive solutions that foster development of compelling end products for storage markets,” said Stephen Turnbull, portfolio manager for Freescale’s Networking Systems Division. “This effort is taking the PowerQUICC architecture into exciting new applications and we look forward to offering our joint customers the technology, experience and insight they need to win in highly competitive markets.”

“Delivering our ViStor VTL software solution on the Hifn/Freescale design platform is a huge business advantage for Cofio,” said Tony Cerqueira, president of Cofio. “We can now offer our customers a true best-of-breed storage-specific hardware platform that is optimized for ViStor and essentially give our OEMs and integrators a complete drop-in VTL solution. We are intrigued by the potential of working with Hifn and Freescale in the future to have the luxury of their high-value hardware designs driving our innovative storage software solutions.”

Hifn’s Express DR cards are the industry’s first enterprise-class data storage reduction accelerators, providing virtual tape library-applications (VTL) ISVs a unique go-to-market advantage with an easy-to-integrate capacity optimization solution that leverages multiple processors to deliver unprecedented compression hardware-offload performance with high reliability and intelligent data reduction features. Designed for critical data storage server environments ranging from continuous data protection (CDP) to network-attached storage and storage area networks (NAS and SAN), Express DR improves overall performance and the system total cost of ownership (TCO) while ensuring zero-defect data. The Express DR product line includes Hifn’s powerful DR 250 and 255 cards, the industry’s first cards that accelerate hashing, compression and encryption algorithms in hardware to offload the heavy lifting functions and speed up performance to provide multi-gigabit acceleration functions for today’s most demanding data de-duplication and data reduction applications.

Built using e600 Power Architecture cores and leveraging the PowerQUICC system-on-chip (SoC) platform, Freescale’s MPC8641D dual-core process or is engineered to deliver breakthrough performance, connectivity and integration f or a range of applications. The strength of the device is its high performance and integration, which translates into smaller boards and higher processing density for storage applications. With dual-core performance and integrated northbridge and southbridge functionality, this single chip can replace what could take up to four chips using other solutions. Additionally, all core-to-peripheral connections are internal, so board designers avoid difficulties related to laying out high-speed parallel buses.

Cofio’s ViStor VTL emulates a physical tape library, allows backups to travel from disk to disk, enables faster backup and restore times, and reduces TCO by seamlessly integrating with an existing backup infrastructure. ViStor provides the ability to split the VTL into multiple libraries, allowing several backup applications to share the same disk resource, and to stage disks to ViStor for centralized backups. The ability to co-exist in the iSCSI and Fibre Channel worlds gives ViStor a unique edge over other solutions. ViStor is targeted at the system integrator and OEM markets, enabling them to extend their disk solution offerings.

Cofio Software, Inc.

Freescale Semiconductor

Hifn