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The Storage World Goes Xeon: Page 2 of 2

Just a few years ago there was a clear division between storage products, like Windows Storage Server based NAS appliances, which were based on industry standard server platforms, and what the steely-eyed storage admin considered real hardware. Real hardware used custom ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processor and protocol offloads and other proprietary hardware to deliver at least midrange performance and reliability. Today the trend i
Howard Marks
October 21, 2010

Even sophisticated products like IBM's StorWise V7000 are
build around Xeons and the Storage Bridge Bay architecture.  Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) is a new
multi-vendor, or dare I call it standard, architecture that houses two "server"
blades in an enclosure with disk drives. 

In SuperMicro's version each server controller holds dual Nehelem
processors and has 3 PCI-e slots while the SAS controllers on mezzanine cards
share access to the 16 drives in the 3U chassis.

I expect to see a lot of SBB systems over the next year as
it lets vendors using clustered controller software build very cost
effective, single chassis systems that can still use SAS or Fibre Channel
attached JBODs (Just a Bunch of Disks) for expansion.

The real kicker will come with Intel's Jasper Forest
processors that not only includes the PCI-e controller logic to keep chip
counts, therefore total costs down. Jasper Forest processors can share PCIe bus lanes between
dual controllers so if a component on one controller fails, the other
controller can still access the PCI-e bus.    

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