The RC5000 series marks Ciprico's first significant step into the enterprise IT
and hybrid digital media-IT storage markets. Given the processing power now
available in today's multi-core CPUs, Ciprico feels that a rapid shift will
take place toward pure software based RAID implementations inside of servers
accelerated by products such as the RC5000 family. Software based RAID
significantly reduces overall system costs and offers improved performance.
The RC5000 series controllers provide support for the latest serial attached
SCSI (SAS) and serial ATA II (SATA II) specifications, as well as support both
the traditional PCI-X and newer PCI Express bus standards. Shipping
in May will be the eight-port versions of the 5000 family, including the low
profile PCI-X-based RC5110-08 and RC5152-08 boards, and the PCIe boards the
RC5210-08 and RC5252-08. All versions support the new mini-SAS SFF8087
connectors. Ciprico also has plans to ship higher port count 12 and 16 port
SAS/SATA II boards based on the recently announced Marvell 6640 SAS/SATA II
controller chip.
The new software drivers released with the 5000 series boards
will support Windows and Linux operating systems, and are fully compatible with
the earlier 4000 series.
These new cards have demonstrated performance of more than 1.1GByte/s
throughput using only 16 SATA II drives. Using the advanced spanning
algorithms, it is possible to create virtual arrays of up to 32 drives with any
configuration of 4, 8, 12 or 16 port boards.
Pricing
for the enterprise level RAID 5 class RC5152-08 and RC5252-08 products are
$299, with the entry level RAID 0, 1, 10 versions of the cards, the RC5110-08
and RC5210-08 priced at $219. The 12 and 16 port cards are expected to start
shipping in the third quarter of this year.