Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

ASTUTE BETS ON CUSTOMIZABLE LOGIC FOR NEXT-GEN STO DEVICES
by William Fellows for the451.com

Astute Networks has unveiled its storage silicon chipset, Pericles, designed for use in new classes of network storage processing devices built by OEMs. Astute joins Trebia and Silverback in announcing products for the next-generation network storage device market.

Impact assessment:

The message

Astute joins Trebia and Silverback in announcing products for next-generation network storage devices. It emphasizes 10Gbps performance and support for TCP/IP, FC and iSCSI.

Competitive landscape

At least a dozen companies are targeting this sector with various combinations of 1Gbps, 10Gbps Ethernet and fiber channel hardware, firmware and software offerings.

The451 assessment

With first OEM products not expected until the end of next year, the field is still wide open for other entrants. There's no guarantee that the companies that announce products first will succeed. Chip giants, including Intel and Broadcom, are still watching from the sidelines to see which way the cookie crumbles, and where they will play.

Technology

Astute says Pericles will enable OEMs to integrate their own software -– including virtualization -– which will work with any of the standard storage protocols Pericles supports, including fiber channel, iSCSI, TCP and FCIP. It can be used in FC and iSCSI/Ethernet boards.

Pericles operates at wire speeds of up to 10Gbps. Its engines are claimed to accelerate any storage protocol, as well as the functions used to support virtualization, synchronous and asynchronous mirroring, snapshot, failover and real-time traffic monitoring.

It includes dual SPI-4.2 ports to allow traffic to flow through the network to a switching fabric, and a specialized parsing engine handles multiple storage protocols simultaneously, including proprietary formats. It also provides the ability to look into SCSI payloads to extract the necessary parameters used by storage services software, Astute says. OEMs write code using a C-based compiler combined with a C-based simulation model of Pericles to leverage third-party software, or can develop their own application on any of the 10 267MHz embedded Tensilica RISC cores.

The chip comes in a 720 ball grid array (BGA) package with a footprint of 25x32.5mm. Samples and a hardware development kit are due this quarter (an SDK is already available). Pericles costs "several hundred bucks," it says.

Market

Target OEMs include manufacturers of intelligent SAN switches, virtualization platforms, iSCSI gateways, server blades, FCIP gateways, storage networking devices, multiprotocol SAN switches and storage disk arrays. Astute believes it will prove to be a popular solution for in-band virtualization devices -– the largest obstacle for which has been the performance hit. It claims Pericles eliminates performance degradation.

Astute says Pericles can also be used for other intelligent networking applications, including intrusion detection systems, Layer 7 switches, server load balancing, blade server systems, stateful firewalls and SSL acceleration platforms.

The company identifies 'first generation' as a class of storage switches with high stateful protocol performance but low port density, limited network layer support and low performance. By contrast, it operates at 10Gbps, supports TCP/IP, iSCSI, FCP and FC/IP plus Ethernet FC and InfiniBand.

Competition

Astute, Aarohi, Chelsio, Siliquent, iVivity, iReady, Trebia (1Gbps), Silverback, BigSur and others are offering particular combinations of 10Gbps Ethernet silicon, firmware and software that they hope will appeal to this target network storage device market. Others are targeting security appliances and content acceleration.

Rival offerings include hard-core ASICs, more general-purpose processors with programmable software layers to address the entire stack to iSCSI, and FCIP and gateways. Each performs TCP/IP offload to some degree, and all claim to be working from a 10Gbps design point -– albeit pressed into 1Gbps and 2Gbps networks initially.

Astute believes the market will build out in much the same way as the network processor space -– and it should know, that's where the company was focused in its early days. It says reprogrammable logic -– such as Pericles -– will win out over initial hardwired ASIC designs. However, there's little evidence to support a view that any one company has the right technology mix, as the OEM design, development and validation cycles are protracted, and few want to be made public.

Customers, reference design wins and M&A activity will separate them. Rivals have claimed Astute is the least likely to succeed because, they say, it is basically a repositioned network processor company coming at the market with a 1Gbps design. And it's true that in the marketing materials that Astute was peddling a year or two ago, the primary intended market was network processors for use in Internet datacenter equipment, with storage networking a third or fourth opportunity.

But Astute is one of the few that can point to customer wins -– although the deal with Agilent is a one-time licensing agreement. Astute maintains it is a chip company and doesn't plan to cut any other license deals. It is also used in switches developed by Pirus, the company acquired by Sun Microsystems.

Astute claims it has other design wins too, but can't talk about them. It doesn't think any vendor is going to ship product using Pericles -– or any of the rivals' chipsets -– until around the end of next year.

Business Model

Down the road, most of the companies in this space will either go to the wall or be acquired. Few if any will remain independent. Astute agrees, but says its operating business model is about developing product, winning customers and achieving breakeven. It's not shopping itself.

Astute has 53 employees and has raised $23m, and may seek more.