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PLX Technology, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., USA, is an industry-leading
global provider of semiconductor-based connectivity solutions primarily
targeting the enterprise and consumer markets.
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The company develops innovative
software-enriched silicon that enables product differentiation, reliable
interoperability and high performance.www.plxtech.com.
See also:-PLX
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com and
PLX's PCIe switch &
bridge chips
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Who's who in SSD?
- by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - February 2012
Among other things - PLX is the leading
supplier of PCIe interface chips (extenders, routers, switches).
These
chips enable SSD designers to create simple and complex fabrics right on the
SSD card. Just as in earlier years - the SSD market learned to appreciate the
importance of the SSD controller architecture in predefining the performance,
reliability, cost, strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and limitations of
SSDs - so too - it's important to realize that some chipmakers make it easier to
support specific subsets and supersets of all the possible PCIe topologies
than others.
Among the many oem customers who PLX's PCIe switch
technologies inside their
PCIe SSDs are
industry leaders -
Fusion-io and
OCZ.
Due to the
emerging size of the PCIe SSD market - I expect that many more SSD companies
will be evaluating what's involved in PCIe for the first time - and trying to
get a sense of the direction this technology is going.
PLX has
created a bunch of white papers and videos which may be helpful for product
marketers (to get a feel for the performance numbers) and designers (to get a
feel for what glue technology is available to get them started quickly).
Even
if you're not in an SSD company - but just a user or analyst - these educational
materials will help you understand what are the possibilities in the PCIe SSD
market today - and what new types of SSD will these chip technologies support in
the future? Here's a selection.
- enabling
PCIe SSDs - a PCIe chipmaker's view - This introduces you to what PCIe
can do for SSDs. It has some nice pictures which show you some of the various
connection architectures that PLX's chips support.
"In its first
generation, referred to as Gen1, the speed was set at 2.5 giga-transfers per
second (GT/s) serial bi-directional interface, then later enhanced to 5GT/s
(Gen2) and eventually 8GT/s (Gen3). The PCI-SIG forum is already discussing
16GT/s for Gen4. The beauty of PCIe is that a designer can combine 2, 4, 8 or 16
of these PCIe lanes into a single data port. Equally important to those
designers is that all PCIe Gen2 and Gen3 ports are required to be
backward-compatible."
- PCIe
in enterprise SSD designs (video) - This includes an introductory tutorial
into PCIe and its performance and architectural capabilities for SSDs including
automatic failover and multi-host capabilities. PLX's switch chips also supports
failover if the fault occurs in the PCIe switch fabric chips themselves.
- PCIe
as a fabric for data center clustering (video) - PLX's PCIe extenders and
switch chips support lossless, software light, high performance CPU to CPU
memory transfers - and shared I/O - for upto about 200 nodes - as a
mini-cluster. At the next level of scalability you can interconnect these
clusters.
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Iin March 2011 -
PLX Technology
announced it's
working with system partners worldwide to accelerate adoption of
PCIe SSDs.
In
December 2008 - PLX Technology announced a definitive agreement
to acquire all of the outstanding shares of capital stock of
Oxford Semiconductor.
That gave PLX a range of SoCs for
NAS and DAS (USB,
FireWire and
SATA) bridges,
interfaces and RAID
controller products.
In October 2011
OCZ agreed to acquire
the UK Design
Team (approximately 40 engineers located in Abingdon) and certain assets
from PLX Technology which
will enable OCZ to accelerate the development of its next generation of fast
SSDs - while also reducing development costs. I learned later that this core
technology group was based on PLX's acquisition of
Oxford Semiconductor
in 2008. |
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| SSD sudden power
loss management |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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| don't all PCIe SSDs
look pretty much the same? |
When you look at the
photos and headline specs for high speed PCIe SSDs - it's easy to come away with
the impression that they all look the same and have about the same performance.
After
all - how different can they be?
But don't let the experience of the
2.5" SSD market -
in which clusters of consumer SSD vendors use the
same or similar
controllers and hover
close together inpopular
(consumer) performance rankings - give you the wrong idea about
PCIe SSDs.
In
this market the performance limits and capabilities of the SSD aren't set by an
old hard disk interface
and package limitations.
In the PCIe market the products you get are
limited only by the imagination of the designers - tempered by the guesses of
marketers who are trying to predict the optimum (most salable) features for an
ideal SSD. |
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| How big was the
thinking in this SSD's design? |
Does size really does matter in SSD
design?
By that I mean how big was the mental map? - not how many
inches wide is the SSD.
The novel and the short story both have their
place in literature and the pages look exactly the same. But you know from
experience which works best in different situations and why.
When
it comes to SSDs - Big versus Small SSD architecture - is something which was
in the designer's mind. Even if they didn't think about it that way at the time.
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For designers, integrators,
end users and investors alike - understanding what follows from these simple
choices predicts a lot of important consequences. ...read the article | | | | |
