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"When InSpeed was first introduced four years ago, I told the world that if storage OEMs aren't using a switched back-end, they will need to explain why. This milestone not only validates the strong market demand for InSpeed, but reinforces the tremendous benefits derived from embedded switching, such as improved performance, serviceability and availability. With nearly all of the storage OEMs as customers, Emulex continues to raise the bar in terms of delivering innovative technologies that improve the functionality of storage systems worldwide."
Steve Duplessie
Founder and Senior Analyst
Enterprise Strategy Group
InSpeed® Technology
Emulex's field-proven and award-winning InSpeed Technology is commercially available as fully integrated Fibre Channel SOCs (Switch on A Chip). Since it's introduction in May 2002 with the InSpeed SOC 312, multiple generations of InSpeed Technology have been introduced - InSpeed SOC 320 in March 2003, and InSpeed SOC 422 in January 2004. These technology advances all demonstrate that InSpeed's significance for the storage industry goes well beyond it being a technology first. Point-to-point switching for external storage back-ends was invented by InSpeed - this is a market that InSpeed dominates today. InSpeed has enabled a true paradigm shift in the way storage providers design their storage enclosures and has become the defacto standard for embedded storage switching. Point-to-point switched back-end storage infrastructures are now a reality for next generation storage architectures.
Why the Need for InSpeed?
As
disk and tape drive densities increased to accommodate the exponential growth
of storage capacity required by end users, the "shared bus architectures" used
to feed storage devices in the drive arrays increasingly became a liability
to the RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) characteristics and
performance of storage systems. Interim software and hardware additions such
as port by-pass circuitry, or "PBCs," emerged and mitigated some of the more
acute pain points inherent in the shared back-end architecture. But they did
little to solve the serviceability blind spots or enable predictive health monitoring.
Each storage device was still a single point of failure capable of bringing
the entire storage array off-line. The most common drive errors still often
required on-site service from the system manufacturer. Drive saturation, scalability
limitations and system latency continued to increase-as did the costs and man
hours associated with keeping stored data on-line and available to business
applications.
What is InSpeed?
InSpeed technology is an advanced point-to-point switching architecture coupling a non-blocking crossbar switch core with embedded SERDES and unique loop port logic resulting in a single, highly integrated SOC (Switch-on-a-chip) capable of handling multiple Fibre Channel devices in embedded SOC, blade and box environments. InSpeed is a field-proven technology with a point-to-point, high performance switched back-end architecture and dramatically improves storage system RAS and performance and lowers MTTR and maintenance costs.
