19 August 2003 Sunnyvale, CA. Lightwave Europe -- Developer of "extreme broadband communications solutions", Marvell has announced a 3-Gbit/s Serial ATA II PCI-X host controller that will enable the next generation of Enterprise Serial ATA storage applications.
The company says that by using the new 88SX6081 (8-port) and 88SX6041 (4-port) Serial ATA II controllers, OEMs are developing the "industry's highest performance, most cost-effective solutions" for Server RAID on Motherboard (ROMB), RAID Adapters, Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), and Nearline Storage Arrays.
In 2001 Marvell introduced the first Parallel-to-Serial bridging products, and in 2002 the first 4- and 8-port 88SX50xx PCI-X Serial ATA host controllers. The company says it has shipped over 5 million Serial ATA ports to date and achieved over 50 design wins with its Serial ATA products.
"Serial ATA technology is already becoming a significant force in the development of lower cost server and external disk storage systems, and is ramping in share as the market leaders in these spaces continue to introduce Serial ATA based systems into their product lines", said Sean Lavey, a Semiconductor Analyst with IDC. "The introduction of Serial ATA II based silicon should accelerate this trend as it provides critical performance improvements necessary for adoption in a wider range of enterprise environments".
"We are seeing strong adoption of Serial ATA technology in the market-leading vendors for Servers, RAID Adapters, enterprise RAID Arrays and Nearline storage," said Balaji Baktha, General Manager of Marvell's Storage Networking Business Unit. "Marvell's Serial ATA II solutions provide these customers a platform to develop a host of next generation enterprise applications."
The 88SX60xx controllers implement Marvell's second-generation Serial ATA physical layer (PHY) technology that supports both 1.5 Gbps and 3.0 Gbps operation for high performance Serial ATA backplane implementations. Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) provides optimal EMI performance for lower enclosure costs and easier system certification.
Operation at 3.0 Gbps enables plug-and-play support for next generation Serial ATA II 3.0 Gbps Hard Drives. Serial ATA II Port Multiplier support allows aggregation of multiple 1.5 Gbps Serial ATA links into a single 3.0 Gbps host port for high-density storage enclosures using next generation 2.5" form factor drives.
The 88SX60xx devices implement Serial ATA II Native Command Queuing (NCQ) significantly increasing performance on enterprise applications such as email servers and databases that rely heavily on random accesses. The 88SX60xx devices also support Serial ATA I/ATA-6 Tag Command Queuing (TCQ) used in Marvell's first generation 88SX50xx Serial ATA Host Controllers allowing full interoperability with today's high performance Serial ATA I TCQ drives.