Cavium Demos Octeon Multi-Core MIPS64 Storage Processors

Cavium Networks was demonstrating OCTEON multi-core MIPS64 storage processors at the Storage Networking World Conference, in Orlando, Florida. OCTEON’s Intelligent Storage Service Processors (SSP) are being designed into and targeted for an array of storage applications in the cloud infrastructure such as JBOD, NAS, iSCSI and FC SAN, Data De-Duplication and Virtual Tape Library (VTL).

With the increasing availability and adoption of cloud based services, data center and storage system vendors need to incorporate high-performance intelligent features in their systems. These intelligent features include in-line data protection using encryption, reliability and geographic redundancy using RAID and multiple copies, transport layer optimization using compression and block-level granular de-duplication. Other intelligent features such as regulatory compliance, user authorization and fine grain access control and auditing require content aware deep packet inspection and cryptographic authentication. Data center and storage equipment vendors are looking for complete processors and software solutions that can provide the above features at competitive price and performance points.

Cavium Networks OCTEON SSP processor family consists of seven different software-compatible products with 2 to 12 cnMIPS Plus cores and 2MB of on-chip L2 Cache. Additionally, OCTEON SSP processors incorporate advanced storage acceleration for RAID5 and RAID6, TCP, data de-duplication, virtualization and compression/decompression. The OCTEON SSP Processor family integrates required interfaces for networking and disk connectivity with up to two 10-Gigabit XAUIs, two 8-lane PCIe controllers, eight SGMII Gigabit Ethernet ports and memory I/Os with dual 72-bit DDR2 controllers. OCTEON SSP processors are also available with integrated cryptographic offload including AES-GCM, XTS-AES with flexibility to support evolving storage encryption standards. OCTEON SSP also includes innovative and flexible data protection and memory backup features to enable enterprise-class reliability, availability and serviceability.

Cavium Networks demonstrated the following OCTEON
based secure, scalable, and content aware
IP storage reference designs:

• High-performance LINUX iSCSI to Disk (SAS & SATA): Multi-function, fully configurable storage SoC for Cloud Computing that provides 10Gbps line rate performance executing iSCSI, RAID, Security and Compression on a single OCTEON Plus processor.
• SMB & Enterprise NAS designs: Scalable SMB to Enterprise NAS solutions
• De-Duplication: Demonstration of high-performance block-level Data De-Duplication engine on OCTEON Plus
• Deep Packet Inspection: Technology to enable ‘Content Aware IP Storage.’