Features - Storage Innovations:

SIERRA LOGIC UNVEILS CHIP-BASED ENTERPRISE SATA SOLUTION

Sierra Logic, a supplier of intelligent silicon storage solutions, announced its Silicon Storage Router (SR-1216), the industry's first-ever integrated silicon Fibre Channel to Serial ATA solution. The SR-1216 chip and firmware, the first in a series of anticipated product announcements from Sierra Logic, enables storage OEMs to offer true enterprise availability and networked infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of traditional Fibre Channel or SCSI subsystems.

In addition to announcing the SR-1216, Sierra Logic also revealed that it is shipping in volume to two tier-one customers, Dot Hill Systems and Xyratex. Sierra Logic executives, whose deep storage backgrounds include leadership of the Agilent Tachyon team, anticipate more customer announcements in the future and believe that they have already captured tier one customer wins in a majority of the market.

"We are extremely pleased to have aligned with Dot Hill Systems and Xyratex, two of the premiere OEMs in the industry. We are shipping the SR-1216 in volume to Dot Hill Systems for its SANnet II SATA solution, and to Xyratex for its Fibre Channel to Serial ATA Expansion JBOD. Both Dot Hill and Xyratex products enable the highest performance possible, along with Fibre Channel availability on the cost-effective SATA platform," said Bob Whitson, cofounder and chief executive officer of Sierra Logic. "Enterprise data centers are rapidly adopting SATA already, which validates our early vision of lowcost, enterprise-class, mid-tiered storage."

"Xyratex is committed to a strategy of investing in critical new technology that offers customers new sources of value to further enable their competitiveness in the marketplace," said Steve Thompson, CTO of Xyratex Inc. "Sierra Logic's Silicon Storage Router clearly provides an important building block in support of these goals. We are excited to offer our customers a way to drive down the cost of storage while at the same time increasing applications and performance to levels never seen before in SATA."

"Dot Hill is committed to bringing cost-effective SATA solutions to market, such as our SANnet(R) II SATA systems, because we believe this technology brings economical disk-based, nearline storage to customers across a broad variety of industries," said Omar Barraza, director of marketing at Dot Hill Systems. "By selecting Sierra Logic's Silicon Storage Router for our SATA product line, we can now drive a broader scope of applications to our customers with that same economical advantage."

"SATA hard disk drives are one of the most important technologies in the storage industry," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "We tend to focus on the impact of software innovations on the market, but SATA is significantly driving down the total cost of ownership of network storage. One of the drawbacks of SATA is reliability compared to Fibre Channel drives. Sierra Logic enables Enterprise-class reliability for SATA so that in addition to near-line and secondary storage, it can also be used for primary storage as well. SATA has already driven down the cost of storage, and using it for primary storage will enable customers to meet the demands of doing more with less. That is what Sierra Logic brings to the table."