connectivityZONE Products for the week of April 18, 2005
Infrant Technologies Says…
Infrant's Network Storage Processor Family Combines
RAID & Networking Functions
The New Infrant IT3107 and IT3102 integrate Gigabit Ethernet,
Two or Four Serial ATA interfaces and hardware RAID 0/1/5 into a single
chip
Infrant Technologies has announced the highly integrated IT3107
and IT3102 system-on-chip architecture that will power the industry's next-generation
of Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Media Server appliances. By integrating
Gigabit Ethernet, multiple Serial ATA hard disk interfaces, and hardware-based
RAID 0/1/5 redundancy into a single Network Storage Processor, more efficient
network storage devices can be made available to broader markets including
workgroups, offices, and home networks.
"Many user benefits are derived by integrating advanced network and storage features into a network storage processor," said Paul Tien, President at Infrant Technologies. "The Infrant IT3100 network storage processor family reduces the number of core chips needed for storage and media servers, increasing performance and overall reliability while consuming less power at a lower cost."
The Infrant IT3100 family of network storage processors are all 32-bit RISC CPU's. The IT3107 has a 4-channel Serial ATA interface and the IT3102 has a 2-channel Serial ATA interface. Both network storage processors include a Gigabit Ethernet MAC supporting jumbo packets, PCI host controller for expansion flexibility, and hardware RAID supporting RAID 0 striping, RAID 1 mirroring and RAID 5 striping with redundant parity. They also include a 64-bit DDR-SDRAM Interface, an encryption/decryption engine, diskless boot using NAND flash, TWSI interface and support for JTAG boundary scan.
By incorporating Infrant's advanced DataJunction architecture, the communication
bottlenecks associated with multiple hard drives on a PCI bus are eliminated.
As a result, the file transfer performance is greater than many entry-level
servers based on a standard PC architecture.
analogZONE Says . . .
Infrant's basic concept is to integrate all the functions required to support a small RAID array with the electronics required to put the data on a 10/100/1000BaseT network, and to throw in a print server function for good measure. They've already rolled out a product to address the higher-priced SMB-level market which supports up to eight SATA drives. They're now introducing the ExpandaNAS IT3107, a consumer-grade device with half the SATA drives for the SoHo and consumer market. Depending on what works best for your needs, Infrant will happily sell you either the raw chip or a complete OEM-able board that only requires a case, power supply and disks. And power won't be too much of a problem since power consumption for the IT307 is only 5 W.
Powered by a 32-bit SPARC-based RISC core (with several extensions that we'll look at shortly) the chip supports RAID 0/1/5 operation for up to four SATA drives. Its network connection is a single Gbit Ethernet port. A PCI host interface and a pair of USB interfaces for supporting peripherals such as printers complete the I/O complement.
Rather than pass disc data through the CPU, its disc interface bypasses the PCI bus and uses DMA to shove blocks of data from the drives to the on-chip 64 bit DRAM controller. This leaves most of the SPARC's processing power available to manage the disks, handle the print serve tasks, and support its GbE connection at full rate. Infrant has also enhanced the chip's performance by beefing up the SPARC processor's instruction set. While its instruction set is still SPARC v8-compatible, the processor has had the way it executes several instructions optimized to keep critical segments in the fast lane. They also equipped the CPU with additional hardware logic including a hardware table walk-through for lookups, a lock-down cache, and a 3DES encryption core.
The
result is a device that can be used to implement an extremely cost-effective
stand-alone NAS box that sucks the last bit of performance out of its disc
array. It only takes a handful of components (PHYs, some memory, and a few
LEDs) (see Fig. 1) to make your own board, or simply embed Infrant's OEM-able
board in your own package. In either case, the RISC engine has enough spare
MIPS that you modify the reference design software to add custom applications.
Infrant's customers have come up with some very creative add-ons such as
IP camera interfaces for surveillance systems, or turned the generic storage
system into a computer-independent video server. It even has the raw throughput
required to support multiple HDTV media streams.
While
nearly every chip comes with a reference design these days, the one accompanying
the IT3107 is worth noting because of several unique features it offers.
Both the reference design and the OEM board (see Fig. 2) are intended to produce
a NAS box in a 9-inch cube form factor. This is just enough to house up
to four SATA drives which can be hot-plugged directly onto the board without
costly cables. Besides the standard RAID 0/1/5 capabilities, Infrant's software
also supports a mode they call XRAID (expandable RAID) allows you to add
more drives as needs grow by simply hot-swapping one drive at time for a
unit of higher capacity. The innovation here is that the software automatically
rebuilds the RAID array onto the new, larger drive, allowing for easy automatic
expansion of the storage system without having to be a certified network
administrator.
The IT3107 also comes with a Linux-based OS and GUI that allows browser-based management. It can support multiple clients with multiple OSs (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD) on the same network, and does the format conversion required to support file sharing across platforms. You also get a multi-level security system that supports share-based passwords, a username and password scheme, as well as a full-blown Windows Active Directory Services (ADS) suite that uses an authentication server to validate users and grant access.
This combination of hardware and software can be used to create products that allow a family or small business to store critical data on a failure-resistant RAID system that does not require any particular expertise to set up or administer. I don't know about you, but the two times that hard drive failures caught me flat-footed are enough to make me consider the $500 estimated retail price of an entry-level system (including two small SATA drives) to be a great deal. You could also build a similar system using one of several other highly-integrated RAID controllers on the market such as Broadcom's 8603 SAS/SATA RAID-on-a-Chip. But while it's great for higher-end servers and other products, the Broadcom solution requires a second chip to support the NAS functions that would add too much cost for a consumer-grade unit.
Back in the depths of the 2001 recession, my friend and colleague Loring Wirbel suggested that storage would be one of the bright spots of the electronics industry regardless of which way the economy went. His reasoning? Regardless of anything else, the amount of data that is being produced keeps growing as does our dependence on it. While I'm not sure Loring foresaw how the rapid proliferation of multimedia would cause a near-exponential growth of file sizes, he certainly was thinking along the same lines that Infrant was when they developed their series of network-attached storage (NAS) controller chips. I think that these NAS/RAID-on a Chip (NASRoC: my acronym) devices have exciting possibilities because they enable manufacturers to offer products that deliver the security and convenience of commercial-grade RAID systems at consumer-level price points.
The Infrant IT3107 and IT3102 network storage processors,
reference boards and a complete, customizable Linux based operating system
are available now to OEM partners. The Infrant IT3107 and IT3102 network
storage processors are priced at $120 and $80 respectively, in 1000-unit
quantities including a license of the complete Infrant NAS software package.
Board pricing depends on volume and features.
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