Chelsio Rolls Out Unified Storage Motherboard ($4,995) …

Chelsio
Communications
Inc.
announced the Unified
Storage
Motherboard
(USM), a single board computer that creates a storage subsystem of up
to 24 SAS/SATA disks that is accessible via Ethernet a low-cost SAN or NAS system.

It demonstrated the USM at Storage Networking World in Santa Clara, CA.

Targeted at system
integrators/VAD, the USM delivers a performance, scalable,
virtualization read and multi-featured host-independent solution that
consume low power.

Based on a Micro-ATX
form-factor with native 24 SAS port connectivity, the motherboard
uses a high performance threaded quad-core processor as the heart of
the system. In addition to its SAS capabilities, the USM has two PCIe
Gen 2×4 slots for expansion to utilize PCIe-based SSDs or additional
Ethernet or SAS ports. The motherboard includes an LSI Corp.‘s MegaRAID
stack, and features Chelsio’s T4 ASIC, the fourth-generation silicon
supporting TCP offload (TOE), iSCSI, FCoE, iWARP (RDMA), packet
filtering and classification (firewall offload), and traffic
streaming (media streaming). The motherboard natively supports two
ports of 1G/10G SFP+ Ethernet, two ports of 1G/10G Base-T Ethernet,
two USB ports, and one serial port.

The USM also
features Chelsio’s USS software, which is used to configure and
manage the card and storage. It includes features that
simplify the deployment of iSCSI block storage as well as file
sharing in a dependable and scalable way. Single, field upgradeable
software image includes the latest and self-consistent images for all
the silicon. Field diagnostic phone-home service enables remote
diagnostics and preventative maintenance at the customer site.
Manufacturing diagnostics and stress software assists system
integrators with integration, test and diagnostics.

Chelsio is also
announcing 2U, and 4U 24-bay pre-certified storage configurations for
USM based on Supermicro platforms. Initially, USM will support iSCSI
and NAS. In future software updates, FCoE Target and NFSRDMA based on
iWARP RDMA over Ethernet are enabled.

The motherboard will
begin
sampling later this quarter,
and be in production in 1Q2013. The street
price of the Chelsio USM motherboard is $4,995.

Unified Storage
Server SoftwareUSS software supports CIFS/SMB, NFS, RDMA, FTP, HTTP,
Lustre, iSCSI, FC, thin provisioning volumes, volume cloning,
snapshots, instant restore from snapshots, volume encryption, remote
replication, compression, shared storage HA, system monitor and
alert, and a host of other features.

Some additional
features of USS:

• Ease-of-Use: Use
  the Web-based GUI or CLI Interface to configure and deploy block and
  file storage. This also includes the ability to configure the
  supported RAID cards right from within USS.

• Low TCO:
  USS provides some of the lowest cost per GB solutions in the
  industry. Users can add storage to the solution with no additional
  software licenses.

• T4
  Technology:
  USS uses Chelsio’s Unified Wire technology to provide off-load
  capabilities

• Mission Critical:
  Chelsio USS provides for highly available configurations as well as
  replication and snapshots.

• Scalability:
  USS has been deployed in cloud applications with up to half a PB of
  data per head.