Friday, October 16, 2009

Emulex Adds SATA Bridging Support, Links With Ixia

Costa Mesa-based Emulex said earlier this week that the firm has expanded its storage switching chips into the area of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) bridging. Separately, the firm announced a testing link with Calabasas-based Ixia. According to the firm, it has extended its InSpeed line of chipsets to support SATA and SAS bridging specifically to support high performance, solid state disk drives. The InSpeed chips are provided to disk drive array manufacturers, and used for back-end connectivity of the disk drives in those arrays. Solid state disk drives--which use memory instead of spinning platters for storage--mostly use the SATA interface. Emulex's new support for SATA makes it easier to connect those SATA SSDs to Fibre Channel and SAS based enterprise storage systems. In the deal with Ixia, Emulex said the two have produced a guide to testing new converged network adapters, which use the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FcoE) protocol.