16-Drive JBOD Targets SAN Mart

The VSC7148 is claimed to be the first device to integrate an entire 16-drive, 1-Gb/s Fibre Channel arbitrated loop JBOD subsystem on to a single chip. Teamed with the company's SSC100 Fibre Channel Enclosure Management Controller, the device distributes all the high-speed serial links to the disk drives via 16-port bypass circuits. Two host ports are implemented with two pairs of the company's FibreTimer clock-recovery units that can be individually configured as either repeaters or retimers to trade-off signal quality for latency. An auxiliary set of port-bypass circuits implement a second internal loop, giving isolated access to any device while the rest of the system is operating normally. Housed in a 256 BGA package, the device costs $43.75 each/1,000.