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DSG Storage Inc. and Chelsio Communications Inc. have joined forces in an OEM deal announced Wednesday that will lead to the construction of new DSG high-performance iSCSI-based storage systems designed to take advantage of lower-cost Ethernet connectivity. The new DSG storage products are expected to begin shipping in February.
As part of the joint agreement, Chelsio is lending its turnkey T204 quad-port gigabit Ethernet and T210 10GbE TOE/iSCSI acceleration adapters as embedded components playing a vital role within DSGs upcoming SAS-based line of iSCSI arrays.
The new DSG storage system set to debut is currently called “C-Series” although the name and model configurations are still subject to change, according to Barron Mertens, CEO of London, Ontario-based DSG.
The new storage systems are designed to provide SMB (small to midsize business) customers with the same IP SAN (storage area network) performance capabilities as more costly Fibre Channel offerings.
Associated feature offerings with C-Series should include support of up to 2TB, as well as dynamic volume expansion and resizing, snapshots and replication.
From a technical standpoint, Mertens said primary objectives of the C-Series family include: support for choice of either 8 x 1 GbE ports or 2 x 10GbE for the front-end; support for heavy expansion utilizing multiple SAS RAID engines; support for Fibre Channel expansion option; support for 4 to 32GB cache; and delivered in a SAS backplane supporting customer choice of SAS or SATA II drives.
Chelsios T204 and T210 cards both feature the same bundled protocol offload engine that allows users to recover host CPU cycles that normally are diverted toward processing operations.
In addition, the iSCSI targets offer a TCP offload interface for a NAS (network-attached storage) product or a SCSI API for third-party storage products to take advantage of.
When used with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Chelsios iSCSI target stack running in RAMdisk mode and Microsoft Windows initiators, T204 has been recorded delivering over 350K IOPS and 3.6 gigabit throughput, said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications.
Providing more speed and power, the T210 delivers over 600K IOPs and 6.5G bps, albeit limited by PCI-X bus bandwidth.