SerialTek Introduces Small Form Factor 12G SAS and 6G SATA Analyzer

DURHAM, N.H., Sept. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Plugfest -- SerialTek, a leader in storage protocol analysis, expands its line of industry-leading test solutions today with the introduction of the BusXpert Micro II for 12 Gb/s SAS and 6 Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA). With key features found in few other SAS/SATA analyzers, the new Micro II is a portable, lightweight unit that supports multiple analysis processors and a new eye diagram display.

SerialTek's analyzers feature the industry's deepest and most flexible triggering with up to 8 separate simultaneous sequencers, logical branching and counters, and easy definition of frames and commands. Hardware filtering is available to make efficient use of the Micro II configurable buffer, with sizes from 9GBs to 72GBs. The software provides a number of ways to display the captured traffic, from viewing a command transaction and its associated frames in Transaction view to viewing a frame as it looks in the SAS and SATA specifications in Details view. Manipulating the trace via searching, bookmarking, and by decode is available with just a few clicks. Innovations like multi-threaded processing, fast trace display and trace indexing have long been a hallmark of SerialTek' solutions and are available on the Micro II.

"The portable Micro II affords storage solution vendors a great opportunity to provide exceptional support for our customers," said Jinniao Chen, Staff engineer at the Failure Analysis Department of Western Digital.  "The Micro II is compact and light weight, making it particularly well-suited for rapid deployments and re-deployments at customers' sites which is a challenge with larger and heavier analyzers.  Its deep buffers and powerful triggering permit us to capture even the most elusive of issues at customer sites and be able to perform analysis back at our labs, driving new levels of support efficiencies for our organization."

"As a leading manufacturer of integrated controllers for solid state drives (SSDs), a large number of SSDs in the marketplace today incorporate JMicron chipsets," said KK Chen, Senior Manager in the Solid State Driver Business Unit of the Digital Design Division of JMicron.  "SerialTek SAS/SATA analyzers provide JMicron with test solutions that help reduce time-to-market and improve product quality.  The new Micro II offers significant benefits, as it will allow users access to all the features and power of traditional-size SerialTek analyzers but in a compact and portable form factor."

"We have been using the BusXpert series of SAS/SATA analyzers to support our engineering development and analysis projects," said Ming Cai, Senior Manager of the Customer Experience Engineering Division from Seagate.  "Our engineers have realized the benefits of the BusXpert's multiple display views, accelerated search, and fast displays to complete analysis cycles quickly and accurately."

The Micro II also introduces a new waveform "eye" display.  This is a unique capability, found typically on oscilloscopes, that allows for digital signals to be easily observed in a graphic form.  Eye diagrams are used as an aid in obtaining the optimal signal integrity by presenting visually the effects of varying calibration settings on the received serial data.

The new analyzer is currently available for quote with first customer shipments beginning in October 2014.  There is a 4 port version of a Micro II as well as a 2 port version. No cost, no obligation evaluation systems are available.  For more information on the Micro II, including quote and evaluation system requests, please contact us at [email protected].   For more information on SerialTek, our products and solutions, please visit our website at www.serialtek.com.

About SerialTek

SerialTek is a provider of innovative data storage test tools and solutions.  Leading storage manufacturers depend on our products to improve product quality and drive time-to-market requirements.  The company was founded with the goal of making test and measurement solutions more powerful and faster yet easier to use.  SerialTek's engineers include the original inventors of many of the popular features found in protocol analyzers including hardware indexing during capture, buffer segmentation with auto-re-arm, fast histograms and multiple trigger sequencers.  Our solutions support the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), SATA (Serial ATA), PCI Express, Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) and Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) protocols.

SOURCE SerialTek