Next-gen server processor for tough workloads

22nd June 2016

Cavium Inc

Daisy Stapley-Bunten

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The provider of semiconductor products that enables intelligent processing for enterprise, cloud, data centre, wired and wireless networking, Cavium, has announced collaboration with Microsemi Corporation, a provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, to deliver the HBA 1000 Host Bus Adaptor for Cavium’s ThunderX processor family.

The HBA 1000 Series, part of the Microsemi Smart Storage Solutions Family, provides a robust and stable solution that can handle the toughest system workloads and configurations. It is fully compatible with all existing and future Microsemi HBA, RAID and Expander solutions. Available in five different 12Gb/s configurations with up to 16 internal or 16 external SAS/SATA ports, the HBA 1000 Series offers the highest port count in a low-profile, MD2 form factor and 60% less power consumption than competing HBAs.

The ThunderX product family is Cavium’s 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor for next-gen data centre and cloud applications, and features high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, high memory bandwidth and large memory capacity. The product family also includes integrated hardware accelerators, integrated feature rich high bandwidth network and storage IO, fully virtualised core and IO, and scalable high bandwidth, low latency Ethernet fabric, which affords ThunderX best-in-class performance per dollar and watt. They are fully compliant with ARMv8-A architecture specifications as well as ARM’s SBSA and SBBR standards, and widely supported by industry leading OS, Hypervisor and Software tool and application vendors.

“Microsemi works closely with our ecosystem partners to deliver resilient, efficient and easy-to-use storage connectivity solutions for worldwide data centres,” said Pete Hazen, Vice President of Microsemi’s scalable solutions business unit. “Working with the Cavium team, we successfully developed an initial driver for our 12Gb/s SAS HBA 1000 solution that supports the Cavium ARM-based ThunderX server platforms and enables high performance and power efficiency needs for today’s data centres solutions such as the Cavium CloudScale Rack.”

“Microsemi’s storage solutions are an outstanding complement to the compute performance that ThunderX delivers today,” said Larry Wikelius, Vice President Software Ecosystem and Solutions, Cavium. “This collaboration with Microsemi will provide an even greater choice for system partners and end users as they deploy ThunderX based storage intensive applications into the most demanding data centre environments. Microsemi is a great addition to our ThunderX partner community.”