Mylex Corp believes the announcement of its range of scalable RAID storage technology will open RAID to a far wider market, and give computer manufacturers greater opportunity to differentiate their products. The Fremont, California-based company has introduced three new product sets, including what it says is the first fully-embedded RAID-on-the-motherboard option, known as Rome. With Rome, Mylex is making its chip-level technology available to OEM customers for the first time. Bill North, Mylex vice-president of business development, believes this will reduce the costs of RAID, and open it up to the high volume market. Rome will enable motherboard manufacturers to implement a complete RAID controller onto the motherboard using Mylex’s MYL-86138 RAID co-processor, its BA-81C15 Ultra SCSI input-output co-processor and its RAID firmware and operating system drivers. It is targeted at mid-range departmental servers that require RAID functionality. Milan is an extension of the company’s existing board level RAID controllers, which plug in to a standard PCI slot. It gives full RAID functionality for up to three SCSI channels. The middle ground option, which gives manufacturers flexibility, is Capri. The only committment required by manufacturers is to put SCSI chips on the host board, North said. A plug- in RAID board will then turn the chips into fully functional hardware RAID channels. All three product sets use Intel Corp’s 80960 RP processor, designed in collaboratio n with Mylex. It is a single chip, 32-bit input-output subsystem designed to relieve bottlenecks. All three are managed using a common array management package, Global Array Manager, which has a simple graphical interface and enables a system administrator to manage all RAID subsystems from a single console. North says in this way, Mylex is aiming to open RAID up to a less technical user. The scalable RAID technology will be demonstrated at the Comdex/fall show in Las Vegas next month and the first products will be shipped in December.
