PMC-Sierra Moves to Break I/O Bottleneck

The new SRVc family of controllers, which are based on 40-nanometer silicon technology, are intended to help IT organizations cope with the rising demand for I/O throughput on servers that will be running 20 or more virtual servers that are all trying to share the same I/O bandwidth.

According to Derek Dicker, vice president of marketing for the Enterprise Storage division of PMC-Sierra, the SRVc family of controllers will be one of the first instances of a controller that complies with the new PCI Express 3.0 specification.

Dicker said the SRVc lineup includes the first 24-port controller to allow customers to more easily configure “bricks” of storage based on SAS drives.

Like previous generations of PMC-Sierra controllers, the SRVc is based on the company’s RoCstar architecture and a multi-processor subsystem. The new controllers are expected to first show up in systems using the forthcoming Romley generation of processors from Intel, said Dicker.