14 DAY TRIAL // Cavium Networks is a Mountain View, California-based company specialized in MIPS-based network services and security processors. Cavium Networks offers processor and board level solutions targeting Routers, Switches, Appliances, Storage and Servers. Products range in performance from 100 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s with broad software compatibility.
According to some recent announcements made by Cavium Networks officials, the Californian company intends to enter the storage processor market. Their first chips are said to be sampled from a new Octeon Multicore Storage Services Processor (SSP) line later this year.
Aileen A. Arcilla, senior analyst at IDC, stated regarding this announcement:
"Storage infrastructure is going through significant changes that include data consolidation driven by regulatory compliance, I/O virtualization, storage archival on disk, and increasing storage access over Wide Area Networks. These changes are driving the need for intelligent processing, higher capacity, reliability, security, and data compression in next generation storage solutions."
The MontaVista embedded Linux specialist announced Octeon support even since Octeon has debuted in September 2004. Syed Ali, CEO with Cavium, also said: "Cavium's SSP processor family enables a common architecture across a broad range of performance and capacity points." According to Cavium officials, this Octeon SSP line will consist firstly out of two models [CN57xx and CN55xx]. Both models target fiber channel and Ethernet disk arrays, multi-protocol switches, RAID controllers, virtualization equipment, single-chip iSCSI adaptors, and NAS/SAN equipment.
The Octeon models will come with different peripheral set mixes. Therefore, the Cavium line will be made out of models such as:
￭ the storage processor (SP) - including RAID, encryption, compression, networking, TCP acceleration, and QoS ￭ the secure storage processor (SSP)- - including RAID, compression, networking, TCP acceleration, and QoS ￭ the network service processor (NSP)- ) - including encryption, reg-ex acceleration, de/compression, networking, TCP acceleration, QoS ￭ the extreme processor (EXP) - including reg-ex acceleration, de/compression, networking, TCP acceleration ￭ the secure communications processor (SCP) - QoS - including encryption, networking, TCP acceleration, QoS ￭ the communications processor (CP) - including packet processing, TCP acceleration, and QoS.