Chelsio, AMCC Show at ESC

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Chelsio Communications, Inc., the leading provider of 10-Gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI acceleration adapters and ASIC solutions, and Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC)(NASDAQ:AMCC) today announced the two companies are teaming up to demonstrate a complete, low-cost iSCSI storage solution at the Embedded Systems Conference 2007, held this week in San Jose, CA.

The complete, low-cost GbE storage solution from client to storage server is running hardware accelerated RAID 5 on Linux. The storage server includes AMCC's 440SPe "Katmai" evaluation board featuring the PowerPC 440SPe storage processor with high performance hardware RAID computational capabilities.

Mounted on the board is a 2x1 GbE T3 acceleration card from Chelsio acting as the iSCSI target and an LSI Logic SAS IOC card. The Katmai platform is connected to an 8-disk storage array. The 440SPe runs Linux and the MD driver has an ADMA interface that allows it to access the RAID-specific DMA engines of the 440SPe storage processor. A Microsoft Windows laptop computer acts as the iSCSI initiator. Chelsio's iSCSI 3.1 Target software provides a fully featured target functionality. This is a complete system solution for achieving GbE iSCSI storage networking on a low-cost Linux-based platform.

"This end-to-end demonstration includes all the elements of an iSCSI storage solution and shows that such a system is readily achievable based on a low-cost, low-power PowerPC 440SPe platform," said Charlie Ashton, director of software at AMCC. "We are delighted to partner with Chelsio on this reference implementation and look forward to working with them on future programs that provide even higher system-level performance on low-cost platforms. AMCC's S-series PowerPC processors enable customers to develop affordable, power-efficient storage solutions and we are pleased that Chelsio can provide our customers with key elements of their systems."

Chelsio Communications Inc.Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC)