Chelsio Announces Unified Storage Motherboard: High Performance/Low Cost Solution For SAN And NAS Applications

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Chelsio Communications, a leading provider of 10Gb Ethernet Unified Wire Adapters, ASICs and Unified Storage solutions, today 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 as a high performance, low-cost and easy to use SAN or NAS system.  Chelsio is demonstrating the USM this week at Storage Networking World in Santa Clara.

Targeted at system integrators/value added resellers, the USM delivers a high performance, scalable, secure, virtualization ready, and multi-featured host-independent solution that consume very low power. 

Unified Storage Motherboard (USM):
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 x 4 slots for expansion to utilize PCIe-based Solid State Disks (SSDs) or additional Ethernet or SAS ports.  The motherboard includes an LSI 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 Unified Storage Server (USS) software, which is used to configure and manage the card and storage.  The USS includes a wide array of features that simplify the deployment of iSCSI block storage as well as file sharing in a dependable, reliable and scalable way.   Single, field upgradeable software image includes all 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 Software
USS 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 high availability, 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 easily configure the supported RAID cards right from within USS.
• Low TCO: USS provides some of the lowest cost per Gigabyte solutions in the industry.  Users can add storage to the solution with no additional software licenses.
• Chelsio T4 Technology: USS uses Chelsio's Unified Wire technology to provide unsurpassed off-load capabilities that provide some of the highest performance in the industry.
• Mission Critical: Chelsio USS provides for Highly Available configurations as well as replication and snapshots.
• Scalability: Chelsio USS has been deployed in cloud applications with up to half a petabyte of data per head.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

SOURCE Chelsio Communications