The rapid growth of Internet content, rich e-mail, and e-commerce combines to produce a dramatic increase in the volume of data moving across public and enterprise IP networks. The need for quick and cost effective access to this increasing volume of information drives a requirement for networked storage.

This approach to managing storage will deliver scalable capacity for growth, ease of management, and enhanced reliability. Important storage transitions are now underway, enabled by emergence of complementary networking and I/O technologies. These trends include:

• The transition to iSCSI (SCSI commands transmitted over IP) for Internet Protocol (IP) storage.
• The emergence of Serial ATA (S-ATA) as a disk interconnect.
• The adoption of InfiniBand* architecture as a clustered system interconnect and an embedded switched backplane technology.
• The creation of a new serial bus architecture, PCI Express, as a high performance PCI replacement capable of scaling to 10Gbps and beyond.
• The emergence of Object-Based Storage Devices (OSD); devices with more intelligence and flexibility.

Before the industry can broadly implement networked storage solutions, it must overcome technical challenges, including:

• Scalable performance - How to meet the demands of TCP/IP protocol handling without impacting network and server performance.
• Interoperability and ease of management - How to manage networked storage resources in heterogeneous environments.
• Capacity for growth and cost effectiveness - How to meet growing data volume demands while minimizing cost of ownership.

To help meet these challenges, Intel's storage building blocks will include S-ATA, InfiniBand architecture, and PCI Express capabilities. Additionally, network adapters with iSCSI, TCP/IP, and iSCSI offload capabilities will continue to meet the increasing performance requirements of storage systems. Together, these features will facilitate cost-effective motherboard and system designs and help reduce system costs.

Intel is helping the industry meet the demand for intelligent, highly available storage - provided anywhere on the network - by offering innovative building blocks used in cross-platform Storage Area Networks (SAN), affordable plug-and-play Network Attached Storage (NAS), and reliable Direct Attached Storage (DAS).

The embedded Intel® architecture product family delivers the performance scalability required to meet storage solution requirements at all levels, from entry-level through enterprise. This proven architecture results in highly stable and reliable storage platforms with the added support of a familiar development tools environment and extended lifecycle support.

Intel platforms range from low voltage solutions for thermally sensitive, space constrained environments to high performance Intel® XEON processors. These building blocks combined with reference designs, and un-paralleled product support throughout the product life cycle, make Intel architecture an ideal choice for the storage market.

Designs based on embedded Intel architecture provide storage developers the flexibility and scalability needed to maximize internal development and resource efficiencies to rapidly deploy storage products. With embedded-based designs and readily available hardware and software building blocks from Intel and a growing list of third-parties, developers can focus on their businesses' core competencies and reduce months in their product design cycles.
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Serial ATA (S-ATA) will help enable highly scalable, reliable, and easily managed networked storage systems. Today, S-ATA offers dedicated 150 Mbytes/sec. interfaces to disk drives, with scalability expected to extend to 300 and then to 600 Mbytes/sec. This is an improvement over existing parallel disk interconnect technologies which operate as a bus, requiring bandwidth to be shared by all disks attached to the same controller.

Additionally, S-ATA cables are thinner than parallel cables, allowing for improved airflow inside chassis and easier cable routing. Finally, S-ATA was designed with desktop economies in mind, enabling S-ATA products to be cost-competitive and feature-rich.

S-ATA solutions will be available from Intel, beginning with discrete disk controllers. I/O processors and Intel architecture chipsets with integrated S-ATA controllers will follow.
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As a replacement for in-platform PCI and PCI-X, the PCI Express (formerly "3GIO" or Third Generation I/O") serial interconnect will provide high performance (multiple Gbps per connection) and scalability to networked storage systems. PCI Express will be PCI software-compatible, which preserves existing investments in device drivers. Also, PCI Express offers advanced switching and RAS (Reliability, Availability, Scalability) features that make it well suited to networked storage.

PCI Express solutions from Intel will include Intel architecture chipsets, I/O processors, and other peripheral components.

From helping to guide standards bodies that enable InfiniBand architecture to become a reality, to creating the Intel® Interoperability Lab and Intel® InfiniBand Software Optimization Lab for product testing, Intel is committed to ensuring successful, industry-wide adoption of InfiniBand architecture.

InfiniBand architecture will help speed server-to-server connections and links to other server-related systems such as remote storage and networking devices. InfiniBand architecture's simplified connectivity, improved bandwidth, and enhanced interoperability can increase Intel architecture-based server performance and reliability. InfiniBand can help deliver products that easily scale to meet the growth needs of e-Business data centers, storage service providers, and server farms, worldwide.

Ethernet enables standards-based and pervasive IP-based connectivity throughout the network infrastructure. The emerging iSCSI specification defines the protocol to encapsulate SCSI commands over TCP/IP, enabling transmission of storage traffic over existing local-area and wide-area Ethernet/IP networks. Additionally, the encapsulation of block-level data routing over IP allows sharing of data across a variety of server architectures.

The emergence of the iSCSI protocol and TCP/IP offload engines based on Intel processing technology make it possible to create new standards-based storage solutions, based on IP networks, with performance and throughput scalable up to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. This technology provides a high-speed, low cost, long-distance storage solution for Web sites, service providers, enterprises, and other organizations.

Continuing improvements in Storage Area Networks (SAN) technology aim at reducing total cost of ownership. The improvements extend network reach, improving interoperability and centralizing management in cross-platform server environments.

The iSCSI standard is a key enabler of IP-based SANs. Traditional SCSI commands and data transfers are carried in TCP/IP packets, and these packets can be carried over any Layer 2 transport, including Ethernet. By combining SCSI, Ethernet, and TCP/IP, all highly proven and widely deployed technologies, Gigabit iSCSI provides a solution for interoperability. Installation and maintenance are less expensive because the familiar TCP/IP protocol suite reduces the need for specialized personnel. In addition, replicated data can be far removed from the original data in order to protect against unforeseen critical data loss.

Intel solutions include an iSCSI host bus adapter that enables data sharing over Gigabit Ethernet networks.
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Object-Based Storage Devices (OSD) represent emerging network storage technology that can help network and storage equipment manufacturers produce cross-platform and interoperable devices with more intelligence and flexibility.

Intel Research & Development is investigating how OSD can enable creation of self-managed, heterogeneous, and shared storage. As part of this research, Intel Research & Development is co-chairing the OSD Technical Work Group (TWG) of the Storage Networking Industry Association.
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nIntel believes RAIDIOS is an easier, less expensive and more flexible specification to implement than others. RAIDIOS is a specification used to enable an embedded I/O controller, embedded on a motherboard, to be used as just an I/O controller or to be the I/O component of a hardware RAID subsystem. A RAIDIOS circuit allows an I/O Processor (either embedded on the motherboard or on an add-in card) to configure the I/O controller and service an I/O controller's interrupts. The I/O controller and the I/O Processor together are two of the primary components of a hardware RAID subsystem.

Intel delivers a variety of storage building blocks based on core competencies in processor, connectivity, and bridging technologies. These include embedded Intel® architecture processors and chipsets, iSCSI host bus adapters, server products, storage processors, RAID controllers, and bridges.
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Intel actively creates and promotes industry standard specifications around the technologies driving the evolution to networked storage, assisting the technical community in providing quicker time to market and lower total cost of ownership for solutions.

Realizing real-world opportunities from the powerful transitions now underway in networked storage will require open industry standards, complemented by interoperable building blocks that encourage innovative solutions.
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