Mylex's NEW DACFL RAID Controller INTEGRATES Fibre Channel and Ultra2 SCSI LVD Technologies.FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 11, 1998-- DACFL Designed for Clustering and Storage Area Network Environments Mylex Corporation (NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on :MYLX), the world's leading RAID controller vendor in the non-captive network systems marketplace, today announced 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 availability of the DACFL RAID controller. The controller, which combines Fibre Channel and Ultra2 SCSI LVD See LVDS. LVD - Low Voltage Differential , delivers twice the drive data bandwidth and 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 performance of traditional Ultra SCSI controllers, making it ideally suited for clustering and Storage Area Network environments. "Fibre Channel permits higher bandwidth over greater distances than traditional 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. , delivering data transfer rates over 100 MB/sec across a 30 meter serial link," said Eric Herzog, senior director of market development at Mylex. "The DACFL integrates easily with leading Fibre Channel switch In a computer storage field, a Fibre Channel switch is a network switch compatible with Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. It allows the creation of a Fibre Channel fabric, that is currently the core component of most storage area networks. and hub products, providing simplified network connectivity, cable routing and maintenance." "Consistent with the wide acceptance of Fibre Channel for Storage Area Network implementations, Mylex's DACFL bridges the gap for SCSI users who plan a progressive transition to Fibre Channel," said Farid Neema, president of Santa Barbara storage industry analyst firm, Peripheral Concepts, Inc. "Through the product's support of both Fibre-Channel and Ultra2 SCSI LVD, the DACFL integrates well into either environment, protecting a customer's investment in legacy systems." With dual active, automatic failover/failback host cluster support via two copper FC-AL (Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop) See Fibre Channel. FC-AL - Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop. (Fibre Channel arbitrated loop) channels, the DACFL enables flexible configuration and redundant connections for high-availability applications. In addition to supporting automatic failover/failback, DACFL provides support for the four other critically important clustered storage capabilities, including active-active operation, mirrored write caching, scalable I/O performance and scaleable I/O capacity. The DACFL is Mylex's second Fibre Channel controller, joining the DAC See D/A converter and discretionary access control. DAC - Digital to Analog Converter 960SF, a Fibre Channel-to-Ultra SCSI RAID controller. Both controllers are extremely well suited for operation in clustered environments and Storage Area Networks. DACFL Provides Customers Superior Performance and Flexibility The DACFL's Ultra2 SCSI LVD drive channel connectivity delivers data transfer rates of over 80 MB/sec per channel over a 12 meter parallel SCSI bus. This relieves IT professionals from slower and shorter drive channels, enabling greater storage flexibility and performance. With Ultra2 SCSI LVD's backward compatibility with older versions of SCSI architecture, customers can also protect their investment in older storage systems and easily integrate them into the DACFL's fibre channel environment. The DACFL's streamlined architecture provides a separate memory for cache, cache look-up tables, and the CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. instruction store to eliminate bus contention for optimum throughput. The DACFL hardware supports dual active configurations. The DACFL implements a unique dual RISC processor design which separates data movement and control functions. Utilizing two of Intel's i960(R) processors, the DACFL marries Mylex's own firmware with the performance of the i960s to provide one of the fastest external RAID controllers available. Mylex's breakthrough architecture allows for one processor to manage overall functions of the controller, while the second processor manages Mylex's hardware XOR (eXclusive OR) A Boolean logic operation that is widely used in cryptography as well as in generating parity bits for error checking and fault tolerance. XOR compares two input bits and generates one output bit. The logic is simple. If the bits are the same, the result is 0. engine and on board memory. "We have worked closely with Mylex for many years," said Wendy Vittori, general manager of Intel Corporation's Connected PC Division. "Mylex's innovative use of the Intel i960 co-processor showcases the power of the i960 to significantly improve the performance of server operations. The combination of the i960 with Mylex's advanced Fibre Channel RAID technology makes this an ideal solution for customers considering a move to clustering or Storage Area Networks." The DACFL supports drive connectivity via four wide Ultra2 SCSI LVD channels. Each controller supports up to 60 drives configured into as many as eight LUNs, allowing over one terabyte of scaleable high performance capacity per controller. By utilizing multiple DACFLs, customers can create large mission-critical OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) See transaction processing and OLCP. OLTP - On-Line Transaction Processing and OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) Decision support software that allows the user to quickly analyze information that has been summarized into multidimensional views and hierarchies. OLAP tools are used to perform trend analysis on sales and financial information. systems. DACFL Delivers Exceptional Manageability and Configureability DACFL provides customers the same high level of manageability that they have come to expect with all Mylex RAID products. The DACFL offers a host of fault tolerant features, including automatic detection of failed drives; automatic and transparent rebuild of failed drives; on-line RAID capacity expansion; hot spare drive support; hot swap drive support; RAID configuration stored on disk and in non-volatile RAM; SMART capable drive support and SAF-TE SAF-TE SCSI Access Fault-Tolerant Enclosure enclosure management. Another important feature of DACFL is Mylex's GAM(TM) (Global Array Manager), which enables the RAID system to be configured, maintained and monitored remotely over the Internet or corporate Intranet. GAM is the world's best-selling RAID management software and supports Mylex's entire line of RAID controller solutions. The DACFL supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 3, 5, 10, 30, 50 and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) A group of hard disks in a computer that are not set up as any type of RAID configuration. They are just a bunch of disks. JBOD - Just a Bunch Of Disks , offering maximum RAID level flexibility customizable to the user's application. In addition, the DACFL has an 8 MB processor control cache and a separate data cache configurable up to 256 MB, allowing for simultaneous execution of commands on both processors. Either write-through or write-back options for each logical array provide versatile performance options. For maximum convenience, the DACFL is field upgradeable with flash EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable ROM) A rewritable memory chip that holds its content without power. Although EEPROMs spawned flash memory, EEPROMs are byte addressable at the write level, whereas flash chips must erase a block of bytes before rewriting. . Pricing and Availability The DACFL controller ships to OEM customers this month. OEM pricing will range from $2,000 to over $4,000, depending upon configuration and volume. About Mylex Founded in 1983, Mylex Corporation is an ISO (1) See ISO speed. (2) (International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland, www.iso.ch) An organization that sets international standards, founded in 1946. The U.S. member body is ANSI. 9001-certified developer of high-performance hardware and software for moving, storing, protecting and managing data in network and desktop environments. Ranked as the No. 1 supplier of RAID controllers in the non-captive network systems disk array market in the 1997, 1996 and 1995 DISK/TREND reports, Mylex produces high-performance RAID controller subsystems, SCSI adapters and complementary computer products for network servers, mass storage systems, workstations and system motherboards. Mylex products are sold globally through a network of OEMs, major distributors, VARs and system integrators. Mylex Corporation is headquartered at 34551 Ardenwood Blvd., Fremont, CA. 94555, and can be reached by phone at 510-796-6100 or toll free at 800-77-MYLEX, by fax at 510-745-8016 or on the Internet at http://www.mylex.com. CONTACT: Dovetail dovetail (dov´tāl), n a widened or fanned-out portion of a prepared cavity, usually established deliberately to increase the retention and resistance form. Public Relations Mark Coker/Corey Oiesen, 408/395-3600 mark@dovetailpr.com/corey@dovetailpr.com or Mylex Corporation Eric Herzog, 510/608-2469 Judith Lawrence-Gates, 510/608-2244 erich@mylex.com/judithl@mylex.com |
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