Storage Hardware Vendors Quick To Embrace Itanium 2

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On the day that Intel announced the availability of the new Itanium 2 processor, a number of storage companies made announcements of product support for the latest in Intel’s 64-Bit processor family.

Itanium 2-based servers and workstations are expected to deliver up to twice the performance of Itanium-based systems, but the processor can also offer significant performance improvements in any device including storage adapters and subsystems that require the highest levels of throughput and performance.

The Itanium 2 processor uses an Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC)-based design that enables new levels of compute parallelism and scalability for large workloads. In addition it employs an Innovative machine check architecture and extensive ECC coverage to deliver enterprise-class reliability and availability for high up-time environments.

Companies Make Product Support Announcements

Emulex announced that its LightPulse family of Fibre Channel HBAs fully support Itanium 2 processor-based platforms.

“We have worked closely with Emulex to ensure that its connectivity solutions are fully compatible for use with the new Itanium 2 processor,” said Mike Graf, product line manager for Intel’s Itanium processor family. “The Itanium 2 processor will bring superior performance to the most demanding enterprise and technical computing applications.”

The Emulex LightPulse LP9802, which is Itanium 2 processor-ready, offers a highly integrated, full-duplex 2Gb/s Fibre Channel PCI-X HBA for use in servers based on either PCI or PCI-X expansion busses providing superior performance.

QLogic Corp announced full support for the Itanium processor and architecture in Windows and Linux environments. Drivers are available for QLogic Fibre Channel and SCSI controller chips and host bus adapters (HBAs), including QLogic’s new ISP2312 Fibre Channel chip. The ISP2312 is the processor platform that powers “Fibre Down(TM)” (Fibre Channel connectivity integrated into server system motherboards) applications and the new QLogic SANblade(TM) QLA2340 family of high-performance host bus adapters (HBAs).

Intel’s enormous R&D investment and economies of scale have resulted in an open enterprise architecture that delivers outstanding performance and value,” said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing, QLogic Corp. “Its common building blocks and broad industry support give choice and flexibility to solutions providers and end users.”

LSI Logic Corporation announced that their dual-channel LSI53C1030 controller will combine with the Itanium 2 processor, to deliver robust, high-performance storage solutions. The LSI Logic Ultra320 SCSI controllers will be used in a number of platforms expected to be available later this year.

“The Itanium 2 processor provides a very robust and optimized foundation for compelling technologies such as Fusion-MPT,” said Bill Wuertz, general manager/vice president for LSI Logic’s Storage Standard Products Division. “Customers can confidently migrate to a new performance standard with proven interoperability, reliability and double the data transfer rate of Ultra160.”

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