From SANBlaze, Ten-HDD ATCA Storage Blade With FCoE and iSCSI

SANBlaze Technology, Inc. announced the SB-ATCA2000, its next generation storage services blade built with Intel’s Jasper Forest Nehalem-based embedded processor. In addition to built-in support for both 10Gb iSCSI and NAS protocols, it becomes the industry’s first blade to add offloaded FCoE target support.

With its CPU complex, and 16 lane Gen2 PCI Express (PCIe) bus, the ATCA2000 combines dual 10Gb network ports with up to ten hot-swappable disks in a single ATCA slot. The blade and available RTM can support up to 10 SATA or SSD drives or 6 SAS drives. Based on currently available disk sizes, the board can support 7.5TB SATA, 6TB SAS or 3TB SSD-based storage capacities. User data is protected with hardware RAID levels 0, 1, 5 or 6, and a battery protected DDR2 write back cache. An Intel 82599 10Gb Ethernet controller provides access for the external host blades via option 9 fabric connections. It is the first 10 Gb controller to support TCP/IP, iSCSI and FCoE CRC offload.

The architecture keeps both 10Gb Ethernet pipes full while servicing dozens of external initiators. Measured sustained bandwidth exceeds 2000MB/s; measured iSCSI IOPS 40K-50K, FCoE IOPS of 100K.

"The ATCA2000 storage blade serves two architectural purposes in mission critical ATCA deployments," said Steve Looby, Director of Product Management at SANBlaze. "First as a replacement for DAS (direct attach storage) boot solutions, the blade eliminates the single spindle, single point of failure that typifies far too many server deployments. Second, as a replacement for a 2-10 TB external SAN, the ATCA2000 eliminates expensive HBAs and cables associated with external storage, and dramatically reduces the storage footprint in terms of both space and power."

The new blade retains the secure html (https) web interface, command line interface (CLI), and setup wizards used to configure previous products. High availability enhancements, as well as full support for VMware provide the enterprise class features required for any storage architecture.

Samples of SB-ATCA2000 will be available by year end.