ARC licenses technology to QLogic Corporation, a market leader in chips for data storage networks
Elstree, England, 31 July 2001 –ARC International plc (LSE: ARK), trading through its subsidiaries as ARC Cores, has announced today that QLogic Corp. (NASDAQ: QLGC), has licensed ARC’s industry-leading, user-customizable processor technology for a new generation of storage area network infrastructure components. ARC was chosen to provide the new embedded processor in QLogic’s devices, with the first implementation in its future iSCSI (internet SCSI) technology products.
QLogic addresses a market need for faster data access between companies’ network servers, workstations and data storage devices, especially in the light of the astronomical growth of data usage by large corporations and on the Internet. Its controller chips are built directly into system motherboards, as well as storage devices, such as disk drives, redundant array of disks (RAID) devices, tape drives and tape libraries. The company also produces host adapter boards that plug into computer systems and storage subsystems, and develops the world’s most innovative storage area network (SAN) switch and switch management products.
Jerry Alston, vice president of engineering at QLogic, said, “We have had our own embedded processor for the past ten years. When we reviewed requirements for our next generation products, we selected the ARCtangent-A4 for our product line because of its small size, speed, and the development tools available with the processor.”
The first developments to use ARC’s processor will be QLogic’s iSCSI line of products. The QLogic iSCSI engineering team is currently developing this technology for use in adapters and storage controllers to enable a new generation of Ethernet SANs. QLogic's iSCSI solution will include innovative, hardware-based TCP/IP acceleration for high performance SAN implementations in Ethernet-based storage architectures.
Bob Terwilliger, president and CEO of ARC, said, “We are extremely pleased that QLogic selected ARC’s processor for its new products. ARC has achieved many successful design wins and enjoys wide application in the network processor market. The real strength of our technology is not just its configurable aspect, but in the ability of our total package of tools and peripheral intellectual property to quickly match our processor to their project requirements. This enables our customers to differentiate their products from those of their competitors at both the hardware and software level.”
Editor’s notes
According to a Gartner Dataquest report entitled “Semiconductors in the SAN landscape” published in April 2001, “QLogic is the leader in unit shipments of Fibre Channel protocol controller chips (including hard drive controllers). See press release “QLogic Leads Market in End-to-End Fibre Channel” issued May1, 2001 at qlogic.com
iSCSI technology (internet SCSI) enables Ethernet and/or TCP/IP-based SANs, to expand storage area networking to a broader variety of networking markets.
Gartner Dataquest forecasts the total external storage market to grow to US$50.3 billion by 2004 with more than 80 percent of that storage being implemented in SANs.
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