Astute Networks, a leader in changing the economics of scalable storage systems, today announced the introduction of the company's Athens Storage Processor family. The Athens family, comprised of the AN2000 and the AN2004 processors, is the industry's most highly integrated multi-protocol storage processor family of devices offering best-in-class price-power performance at more than 1.6 million I/O operations per second (IOPs) in less than 14 Watts. The Athens solutions allow storage OEMs to build systems that offer high-end features, low power and high-performance at entry-level prices. These devices are the first in a series of processors to be delivered as part of the Athens family of solutions.

Astute Networks is uniquely positioned to deliver a single, integrated PCI-Express solution for Fibre Channel, Network Attached Storage and iSCSI storage applications. The AN2000 is a full-featured device that integrates 8 lanes of PCI-Express, 4x1/2/4G Fibre Channel (SERDES), 4x1 Gigabit Ethernet (SERDES), 4x1 Gigabit Ethernet (Copper GMII), and 1x10 Gigbit Ethernet XAUI I/O interfaces. The AN2004 features 4 lanes of PCI-Express and a 4x1 Gigabit Ethernet interface. The on-chip integration of such a wide variety of I/O interfaces enables the Athens family to support lower cost and power designs. By providing processing for storage clustering and high-availability applications, Astute's customers can service multiple markets including enterprise, mid-range and SMB with a single-storage platform. This results in reduced R&D, as well as qualification and development savings.

"OEMs are faced today with an ever increasing need to deliver product solutions that allow end users to lower OPEX and CAPEX costs. That, in turn, drives the need to differentiate their products through scalability, new features and performance at radically lower price and cost envelopes while maintaining reliability and robustness," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Astute Advantage is an approach that uniquely addresses this need by providing an ultra efficient, programmable platform along with proven software. By partnering with reliable, industry leading sub-system vendors for complete, qualified solutions, Astute also provides a time-to-market advantage."

"By combining a parallel RISC processor architecture with specialized hardware engines, the Athens processor family accelerates networked storage protocols to IOPS performance levels that are unprecedented for a customer-programmable chip," said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group. "While maintaining performance, the Astute architecture is easy to program using standard C tools. This enables OEM and software vendors to leverage their existing software intellectual property."

"Building on our proven expertise in storage application design, we developed the Athens family to provide a compelling solution for the storage array and blade server market," said Jon Siann, vice president of marketing at Astute Networks. "Using a combination of high-performance silicon and tightly integrated software, the Athens family takes the bottlenecks and overhead out of storage protocol and software services. In a single chip, the Athens architecture packs the processing capacity in the class of four high-end 64-bit general purpose processor complexes at one twentieth of the power, which enables high-end features in form factors such as the Storage Bridge Bay standard. This changes the economics of high performance scalable storage for sub-systems vendors and OEMs."

The Athens family integrates the I/O ports around a proven clustered, multi-core (10 CPUs) design. The ports can be used in any combination to provide both host and clustering connections. The Athens family provides T10 DIF (Data Integrity Field) for both Fibre Channel and iSCSI, on-chip CRC, and Checksum for improved link integrity. The Athens single-chip architecture has been measured at over 1.6 million Fibre Channel IOPs (fully terminated on chip, requiring no external CPU intervention), more than 200,000 iSCSI IOPs and over 11 Gb/s of complete TCP/IP processing. Overall, Athens offers the industry's best choice for price and power per unit of programmable processing.

Availability

Athens AN2000 and AN2004 are in an 896-pin Hyper BGA package. Parts are in qualification now, and engineering samples are available in Q2, 2006. For more technical information on Athens, visit www.astutenetworks.com.

About Astute

Astute Networks develops storage processors, application and protocol software, and reference designs for the storage array OEMs and sub-system suppliers. In addition, Astute actively partners with sub-system and software vendors to provide OEMs a turnkey solution. Astute's processors offer order of magnitude cost and power savings, and are as easy to program as a general purpose CPU. Founded in April 2000 and headquartered in San Diego, Calif., Astute is backed by venture capital firms including BA Venture Partners, Dali Hook Partners, Tallwood Venture Capital, Seven Rosen Funds, and USVP. Additional information is available at www.astutenetworks.com.