Cavium Networks Announces Broad New Line Of Storage Services Processors (SSPs)
Mountain View, CA - Cavium Networks, a provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, storage and security applications, recently announced the introduction of the OCTEON MIPS64 Multicore Storage Services Processor (SSP) family of products. This family of products has been designed to address the specific needs of the Storage market. The OCTEON SSP single chip solutions combine innovative storage processing with Cavium's proven high performance networking, security and application acceleration processors. The OCTEON SSP delivers two to four times more compute cycles versus many alternatives and integrates advanced hardware acceleration for RAID, compression, de-duplication, security and iSCSI. The OCTEON SSP family scales from low-end solutions to very high performance SAN/NAS systems, providing a flexible, software compatible platform across a broad range of price and performance points. Key OCTEON SSP family features include integration of 2 to 12 cnMIPS Plus 64-bit cores, storage application acceleration, an array of high-speed input/output interfaces including 10-Gigabit XAUI, PCI-Express, Gigabit Ethernet ports, dual DDR2 memory controllers, and innovative data protection mechanisms.
The OCTEON SSP CN57XX and CN55XX are targeted for applications such as Fiber Channel and Ethernet Disk Arrays, RAID controllers, multi-protocol switches, single-chip iSCSI adaptors, virtualization equipment, Protection and NAS/SAN equipment.
"Storage infrastructure is going through significant changes that include data consolidation driven by regulatory compliance, I/O virtualization, storage archival on disk, and increasing storage access over Wide Area Networks," said Aileen A Arcilla, IDC's Senior Analyst for Semiconductors: Networking, Broadband and Storage. "These changes are driving the need for intelligent processing, higher capacity, reliability, security and data compression in next generation storage solutions."
"Existing storage systems implement different hardware and software architectures across the low-end, mid-range and high-end performance and capacity points," said Syed Ali, President and CEO at Cavium Networks. "Cavium's SSP now offers a scalable processor family that enables common architecture across a broad range of performance and capacity points with essential integrated hardware acceleration for RAID 5/6, compression, de-duplication and security."
Current solutions often require multiple chips to perform storage input and output processing, RAID processing and services. These storage systems typically report simple IOPS and raw throughput without reference to full featured performance since performance drops when services are enabled. With the new storage services requirements of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, security, compression, de-duplication, and virtualization gaining traction, full featured performance metrics are becoming important and are forcing OEMs to add new acceleration chips to their storage systems. The new OCTEON SSP family significantly reduces the number of chips required to build full featured next generation storage systems by integrating multiple functions into a single chip.
OCTEON Storage Services Processors
The OCTEON SSP processor family consists of seven different software-compatible products with 2 to 12 cnMIPS™ Plus cores, with clock speeds of up to 1 Gigahertz which provides up to 12 GHz of 64-bit processing and 2MB of on-chip L2 Cache. Additionally, OCTEON SSP processors incorporate advanced storage acceleration for RAID5 and RAID6, TCP, data de-duplication, virtualization and compression/decompression. The OCTEON SSP Processor family integrates required interfaces for networking and disk connectivity with up to two 10-Gigabit XAUIs, two 8-lane PCIe controllers, eight SGMII Gigabit Ethernet ports and memory I/Os with dual 72-bit DDR2 controllers. OCTEON SSP processors are also available with integrated cryptographic offload including AES-GCM, XTS-AES with flexibility to support evolving storage encryption standards. OCTEON SSP also includes innovative and flexible data protection and memory backup features to enable enterprise-class reliability, availability and serviceability.
Performance and Software
The OCTEON SSP processor family offers two to four times more compute cycles as compared to alternative solutions. OCTEON SSP enables storage equipment vendors to build low to high-end scalable storage solutions providing up to 3 Million on-chip virtual IOPS, 10Gbps of iSCSI, 1GB/s of compression / decompression, up to 2GB/s of in-line encryption in a single chip and up to 10GB/s of RAID acceleration. Cavium Networks provides a feature rich software development kit with 12-way SMP Linux 2.6, GNU Toolchain, debugger tools, RAID acceleration APIs and production ready software toolkits for a range of storage protocols. For more information about OCTEON Processors please visit: http://www.caviumnetworks.com/OCTEON_MIPS64.html.
SOURCE: Cavium Networks