Mylex will expand into RAID drive market

Electronic News, Oct 14, 1996

Fremont, Calif.--Looking to diversify beyond the board market, Mylex is planning a foray into the scaleable RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) arena with a three-chip set for embedding RAID storage on a motherboard.

Mylex said it will eventually offer three architectures: RAID-on-motherboard, RAID with embedded Ultra SCSI I/O co-processor and a RAID add-in card--code-named respectively as Rome, Capri and Milan--all built on the company's chipset. The RAID chipset consists of the MYL-86138 RAID co-processor, the BA-81C15 Ultra SCSI co-processor (both Mylex chips) and the Intel i960 RP I/O co-processor.

The MYL-86138 is designed to function as an XOR (logical operator) engine, unburdening the i960 by generating parity information critical to RAID level 5 fault tolerant and write performance, according to Mylex. The MYL-86138 also functions as a cache controller to increase read/write speeds by a claimed 40 percent over like devices. It also supports both error correction code memory to protect against random cache memory faults and enhanced intelligent battery back-up to prevent cache data loss.

The BA-81C15 co-processor features Mylex's SeqEngine automation technology to minimize SCSI command overhead by reducing the number of interrupts generated to the host CPU. The Intel i960 single-chip 32-bit I/O subsystem co-processor, meanwhile, alleviates the system CPU from performing all I/O functions.

According to Mylex and Intel, the integration of the i960 will ensure future compatibility with emerging Intelligent I/O standard architecture and continued migration of RAID technology onto the motherboard.

The new chipset also hardens Mylex's commitment to a specific hardware architecture for extending its RAID product roadmap. Mylex director of product marketing Mike Dreitlein said software RAID is still too labor-intensive to run off the CPU. He favors unloading the function to an intelligent controller, especially with bus speeds increasing to the point where RAID storage looks more likely to become a pervasive feature in the server market.

The Rome architecture, with RAID controller-on-motherboard, targets the mid-range of the server spectrum and is designed for the OEM that needs RAID on every system and has the available space to do so, according to Mylex.

The Capri with embedded Ultra SCSI I/O co-processor would turn existing SCSI chips on the motherboard into hardware RAID channels and enable OEMs to add RAID capability at point-of-sale or in the after-card market.

The Milan is an extension of Mylex's RAID controller family, and is envisioned to emerge as a board-level device that plugs into a standard PCI slot to provide RAID functionality to up to three SCSI channels. As an add-in card, the device would scale to all levels of the storage marketplace, from entry-level systems to superservers. Specific products based on the new architectures will be introduced in December.