Hewlett-Packard Co has announced Tachyon, a Fibre Channel controller integrated on a single chip and designed for high-performance applications in network storage. The company claims it offers data transfer rates of 1Gbps and fully implements the three topologies defined in the Fibre Channel standard: point-to-point, arbitrated loop and switched fabric. Perhaps not that surprising as Hewlett-Packard, along with Seagate Technology Inc and Quantum Corp, is a big backer of the technology, a rival to the IBM Corp-developed Serial Storage Architecture interface. Hewlett-Packard says that so far, more than 40 companies have agreed to take the Tachyon chip OEM, which must be something of a relief to the backers of Fibre Channel, given that IBM has just made engineering details of Serial Storage Architecture available in its drive to establish the interface as the standard for transferring data between computers and peripherals (CI No 2,628). Hewlett-Packard says Tachyon is being designed into host-bus adaptors that support buses including EISA, PMC, PCI, S-Bus, Micro Channel, TurboChannel and VME. Seagate Technology says Tachyon will be the first Fibre Channel chip to operate with Seagate’s Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop disk drives. The first lot of products to use Tachyon will focus on interconnecting host systems to high-performance mass-storage devices such as storage arrays and tape-archival systems. Hewlett-Packard says users will benefit from a sustained Gbps transfer rate, especially people needing to transfer large files. And the company expects Tachyon to accelerate the uptake of Fibre Channel and envisages a world in which a network’s resources are interconnected and available to all users, who will feel as if they are directly connected to peripherals. Fibre Channel supports Gigabit connections at 100 feet over copper cable, up to six miles over optical cable. Tachyon supports existing networking and input-output protocols, like High-performance Parallel Interface, HiPPI, Intelligent Peripheral Interface, IPI and Small Computer Systems Interface, SCSI. By supporting SCSI, Tachyon provides a migration path from SCSI to Fibre Channel.
