Astek With New 4Gb FC HBA

At the NXTcomm 2008 conference, Astek Corporation announced and showed engineering samples of the industry’s highest density 4Gbps FibreChannel Host Bus Adapter in the Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) form factor, the A7404-AMC.

The card is supported under all major operating systems including Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Linux 2.6, LynxOS and VxWorks 5.5/6.x. Built with LSI Fusion-MPT technology, the HBA provides end users implementing FibreChannel infrastructures with up to 4 independent channels each supporting Arbitrated-Loop for up to 127 target devices, for more than 500 enclosures or target disks. System builders can now directly access multiple PetaBytes of storage from ATCA and MicroTCA processing blades.

"Astek’s mission is to deliver the lowest risk path to embedded storage system development for our telecommunications, industrial and military market customers," said Kevin Guy, President and founder of Astek. "With more than ten years of experience designing storage controllers from ASICs to circuit boards, our customers know they have a dependable source for standard and custom storage controller products, and a partner to provide industry leading support for the end product."

The quad port A7404-AMC offers front panel I/O with 4 removable SFP interfaces supporting copper, multi-mode and single-mode optical transceivers, and PCI-Express x8 supporting up to 20Gb/s of data transfer. Direct, switched fabric, and FC-AL loop topologies are supported without special software drivers. Multi-path redundant connectivity with automatic fail-over is supported with optional SAN management software. The HBA is backwards compatible with earlier 1,2 and 4Gb/s cards, and the HBA is software compatible with equivalent desktop PCIe cards available from LSI Logic, allowing customers to transfer development platforms from commodity desktop PCs to the ATCA and MicroTCA platforms without re-writing software.

Agency certifications for the A7404 HBA are expected in 3Q08 for FCC Class A, UL recognition and CE mark compliance. The board is ROHS-6 (lead-free), and a small number of engineering samples for laboratory use are available to customers now.

Production quantities will be available in 4Q08.