Taking issue with our suggestion that UltraSCSI will soon be outpaced (CI No 2,754), Santa Clara, California-based BusLogic Inc, which has just launched its first UltraSCSI product, said there is plenty of life in the standard yet. It said Small Computer Systems Interface is the type of standard that always has a next generation in its hip pocket, ready to pull out, just when the industry thinks its on its last legs. This time it’s UltraSCSI and the FlashPoint LT adaptor from BusLogic will be the first in a generation of UltraSCSI products from the company. It comes with SCAM – SCSI Configured Automatically – which makes plugging devices into the bus an easier affair, said the company. There’s a Flash BIOS for easier updating and the application specific integrated circuit on which it is based has something called SeqEngine, an automation technology that reduces the number of times the adaptor interrupts the host processor. At the moment it supports the 8-bit Narrow UltraSCSI implementation, with data transfer rates of 20Mbps, but the silicon can also support Wide UltraSCSI, which has rates of 40Mbps. BusLogic described it as having been designed for the high-end of desktop personal computers, where PCI is standard. It has a 32-bit bus master and enables Direct Memory Access transfer across the PCI bus at rates up to 133Mbps. The FlashPoint LT comes in a kit for OEM customers and includes BusView, software that displays each device connected to the adaptor, virus protection software, and Media Rack, which is a Wave and MIDI player, and a talking clock. The product will be available from the end of this month for $230 and in kit form for $260. BusLogic is confident that beyond this product, its later generation of SCSI adaptors will support even higher data rates and will always be cheaper than Serial Storage Architecture and Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop, the newer, faster interfaces being developed currently. But the company said that with SCSI as the de facto standard, these newer ones will always be compared to it and the company is developing technology that it said combines the best attribu tes of differential SCSI with the cost of the single line version. This hybrid will be able to move data across distances of at least 30 feet and possibly up to 100 feet. It reckons to have products on the market in erly 1997. Beyond these faster versions of SCSI, the company said it is backing Fibre Channel over Serial Storage Architecture for a number of reasons, one of which is IBM Corp’s dominance of Serial Storage Architecture, which is supposed to be an open standard. Another is that it believes Fibre Channel is technically a better bet. The company, founded in 1988, had planned, last year, to open offices in Germany and the UK, but has put those plans on hold, saying it is just too expensive. Its European operations are directed from the Paris, France office. Although last year it said it wanted to grow the proportion of revenues European sales contributed from around a quarter to a third, it says booming sales in the US meant that although sales over here had grown, they were dwarfed by the US. And it has achieved its goal of last year, namely to sell 60% of its products to OEM customers.
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