HP Announces Industry's First Gigabit Fibre Channel Controller for Directly Connecting Peripherals to the Network; Low-cost Single-chip Solution Advances Fibre Channel Evolution.PALO ALTO Palo Alto, city, California Palo Alto (păl`ō ăl`tō), city (1990 pop. 55,900), Santa Clara co., W Calif.; inc. 1894. Although primarily residential, Palo Alto has aerospace, electronics, and advanced research industries. , Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 10, 1995-- Hewlett-Packard Company today announced Tachyon tachyon (tăk`ēŏn'), hypothetical elementary particle that travels only at speeds exceeding that of light. According to the theory of relativity, the speed of light is the limiting velocity for all ordinary material particles. , the industry's first Fibre Channel controller fully integrated on a single chip. The new chip is designed for high-performance applications in network-attached mass-storage solutions and can transfer data at unprecedented gigabit speeds. The chip will allow vendors of mass-storage solutions, host adapters and computer systems to slash the lengthy development times and high manufacturing costs previously associated with high-speed implementations. At present, more than 40 companies worldwide have agreed to OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and Tachyon and design it into their products. Data General, Clariion, EMC (1) (EMC Corporation, Hopkinton, MA, www.emc.com) The leading supplier of storage products for midrange computers and mainframes. Founded in 1979 by Richard J. Egan and Roger Marino, EMC has developed advanced storage and retrieval technologies for the world's largest companies. and Maximum Strategy are some of the companies that have committed to Tachyon. The first phase of solutions based on the new technology will focus on providing products that will interconnect host systems to high-performance mass-storage devices, such as disk drives, storage arrays and tape-archival systems. "HP and Seagate have been working together closely for 18 months to ensure high-performance interoperability between Seagate's Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop disk drives and Tachyon based products," said Craig A. Frane, director, marketing and planning for Seagate. "Tachyon is the first Fibre Channel chip to operate with our drives." HP's low-cost single-chip solution is expected to advance the Fibre Channel evolution. As companies migrate to Fibre Channel they will benefit from increased capacity, distance and high performance. Results are expected to include decreased hardware costs, removal of the I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output bottleneck, and a reduction in the number of system slots, and possible sources of failures, such as cables. The performance increases (resulting from Tachyon's implementation of Fibre Channel's sustained gigabit transfer rate 100 MB/sec) will immediately benefit applications associated with transferring large database files, computer-aided design computer-aided design (CAD) or computer-aided design and drafting (CADD), form of automation that helps designers prepare drawings, specifications, parts lists, and other design-related elements using special graphics- and calculations-intensive (CAD) models, graphic imaging, and digital video. Fibre Channel is targeted for industries with performance needs typically associated with data-intensive applications. For example, Fibre Channel can help financial services, where heavy data demands generated on the trading floor outstrip out·strip tr.v. out·stripped, out·strip·ping, out·strips 1. To leave behind; outrun. 2. To exceed or surpass: "Material development outstripped human development" current data-transfer capacities. It also can benefit the medical industry, which has developed applications with high data-rate throughput for sharing large, medical image files. In addition, Fibre Channel throughput advances will provide the technology needed to develop high-performance video servers for the entertainment industry. Tachyon is expected to accelerate the development of multivendor Fibre Channel solutions that ultimately will enable all of a campus' compute resources to be interconnected and available to all users with "the feel" of being directly connected. This includes large systems, servers, networked peripherals and compute clusters. Fibre Channel, which combines technical advances of high-speed transfer rates and flexible topologies, will play a key role in delivering high availability and parallel-processing functionality in a single solution. Tachyon lays the foundation for Fibre Channel to cover the mainframe to PC server domain, allowing users to access the ever growing information storehouse. COMPREHENSIVE SUPPORT FOR CURRENT STANDARDS HP is pleased at the large number of design wins and growing support of Tachyon's adoption in all parts of the mass-storage hierarchy. Tachyon is being designed into host-bus adapters that support leading industry-standard buses, including EISA (Extended ISA) Pronounced "ee-suh." A PC bus standard that extends the 16-bit ISA bus (AT bus) to 32 bits and provides bus mastering. ISA cards can plug into an EISA slot. , PMC (1) See Portable Media Center. (2) (PCI Mezzanine Card) A PCI-based mezzanine card that is widely adapted to VMEbus, CompactPCI and PCI cards. , PCI (1) (Payment Card Industry) See PCI DSS. (2) (Peripheral Component Interconnect) The most widely used I/O bus (peripheral bus). , S-Bus, MicroChannel, TurboChannel and VME (Virtual Machine Environment) An operating system from Fujitsu Services (formerly ICL) that runs on its Series 39 mainframes. Introduced in 1975, VME is a comprehensive product that provides a variety of utilities for datacenter operations. . Mass-storage subsystem suppliers are designing the chip into products ranging from the highest-performance arrays to low-end, high-volume products. Additionally, the new Fibre Channel chip supports existing networking and I/O protocols, such as HiPPI(1), SCSI SCSI in full Small Computer System Interface Once common standard for connecting peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, etc.) to small and medium-sized computers. SCSI has given way to faster standards, such as Firewire and USB. (2) and IPI (Intelligent Peripheral Interface) A high-speed hard disk interface used with minis and mainframes that transfers data in the 10 to 25 MBytes/sec range. IPI-2 and IPI-3 refer to differences in the command set that they execute. See hard disk. (3). Supporting standards and bridge products are important to end users because they protect existing SCSI and networking investments, while providing a means for transitioning to Fibre Channel-based products. Manufacturers who use the new chip for Fibre Channel development will be able to address a variety of design requirements with ease. TACHYON SUPPORTS SCALEABLE NATURE OF FIBRE CHANNEL Fibre Channel has created a standard that clearly defines three stages (topologies) of functionality as a basis for truly flexible network peripherals. Information-systems managers have identified Fibre Channel's layered approach as clear and comprehensive in providing the upgrade path needed for future system implementations. The new chip has fully implemented the three topologies defined in the FCS FCS - Frame Check Sequence Standard: point-to-point, arbitrated loop and switched fabric. By fully supporting each topology at the chip level, Tachyon allows solution developers to do what they do best, inspiring the best solutions technically possible for a range of computing needs and budgets. FIBRE CHANNEL VS. SCSI By supporting current SCSI protocols, Fibre Channel offers an easy migration from legacy SCSI implementations. Its higher throughput eliminates the need for the multiple SCSI cards usually required for high-performance computing and storage devices, while preserving existing driver software. Fibre Channel also provides a transfer rate that is 20 times faster than current SCSI volume implementations, and 5 times faster than the fastest SCSI designs. Fibre Channel also addresses distance limitations by allowing gigabit connections at 30 meters over copper cable between nodes and up to 10 kilometers over fiber-optic cable. TACHYON COST AND TECHNOLOGY ADVANTAGE Tachyon is a second generation chip that incorporates the performance features of Fibre Channel into a single chip. This differs from competitive Fibre Channel solutions that implement chip sets requiring local memory and external processors, which increase the overall cost and consume more board space and engineering effort. HP is the second-largest computer supplier in the United States, with computer-related revenue of $19.6 billion in its 1994 fiscal year. Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 98,200 employees and had revenue to $25 billion in its 1994 fiscal year. -0- Note to Editors: (1) HiPPI stands for high-performance parallel interface The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. Please help [ improve the introduction] to meet Wikipedia's layout standards. You can discuss the issue on the talk page. . (2) SCSI stands for small computer system interface. (3) IPI stands for intelligent peripheral interface Intelligent Peripheral Interface (IPI) was a server-centric storage interface used in the 1980s and early 1990s with an ISO-9318 standard. The general idea behind IPI was that the disk drives themselves are as simple as possible, containing only the lowest level control . CONTACT: Hewlett-Packard Co. Michele Reina, 408/447-5334 Seagate Dave Webb, 408/439-2839 |
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