INDUSTRY

Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) today announced the integration of two generations of the company's popular network processing platform in Maranti's CoreSTOR storage controllers designed for high performance storage services. Maranti is the most recent in a series of major networking equipment vendors to profit from the reduced development costs and accelerated time-to-market synonymous with AMCC's best-in-class technology, simplified programming model and on-time delivery. These design wins mark the continuation of Maranti's consistent use of AMCC's solutions through multiple generations of network processor development. Utilizing AMCC's nP7250 network processor, Maranti's storage controllers have demonstrated unparalleled deep in-band virtualization protocol processing and storage replication application performance. Current testing, independently validated by the Tolly Group, has demonstrated throughput results of more than 200K IOPS on a single port, with scalability to millions of IOPS across the CoreSTOR platforms. Maranti's deep in-band storage virtualization processes SCSI block read and write commands with no control path processing and an un-buffered, cut-through data path architecture, which is unique among all SAN storage virtualization products. "We have a long and successful history of working with AMCC and regard them as a market and technology leader in the network processor industry," said Jim Kuenzel, vice president, engineering at Maranti. "Our investment in AMCC's NPU technology enables us to deliver unmatched performance and programmability. The fourth-generation 10Gbps nP7510 is instruction compatible with the nP7250, allowing seamless integration with our existing platforms and effortless migration to deliver the additional storage applications in Maranti's extensible roadmap. AMCC's proven experience, coupled with their delivery of viable network processing and switch fabric solutions to this market, make them an ideal partner for us." The nP7510 provides full 10G processing bandwidth allowing support for emerging 10G Fibre Channel, and 10G Ethernet applications. Each nP7510 runs at 350 MHz providing processing capability for 350 million 32-bit optimized storage networking instructions per second. The nP7510 has optimized multi-tasking capability that allows up to 144 tasks to process frames concurrently and provides four times the code space of the nP7250. AMCC's high-end PRS switch fabric and nP5710, nPX5725 traffic manager device offerings are also deployed in Maranti's solutions. "AMCC's successful track record and unparalleled experience in delivering high-performance bandwidth processing made us a clear choice for Maranti's CoreSTOR storage controllers. In fact, Maranti is working with AMCC on the specifications of next-generation network processors further optimized for storage processing," said Mark Hunsicker, vice president of marketing for AMCC's Communications Group. "By providing best-in-class devices that protect our customer's investment, we enable them to focus on enhancing their own product offerings, capabilities and values."