[EiED Online Review]
Performance Technologies Packs Storage and Opteron Into CompactPCI
William Wong
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ED Online ID #11996 |
January 26, 2006
Performance Technologies showed off its 6U CompactPCI CPC5564 single board computer (see Fig. 1). It supports a 2.2-GHz single-core or 1.8-GHz dual-core Opteron offering 2 Gbytes or 4 Gbytes of PC3200 SDRAM memory with ECC support. It is expandable to 8 Gbytes. The board supports 32- and 64-bit operating systems. These include Linux, Windows XP, and Solaris.
The SBC has an on-board 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch that provides support for PIGMG 2.16 fabrics on the backplane. It has connections to the front panel as well as a pair of ports hosted by the HyperTransport north bridge. There is also a 1-Gbit Ethernet connection to the single XMC/PMC slot. The XMC/PMC slot supports PCI Express and PCI-X mezzanine cards. IPMI support is included on the board too.
Peripherals include keyboard and mouse ports, two USB 2.0 ports, two serial ports, and on-board video. There is an on-board EIDE controller that can support an on-board 2.5-in. hard disk, plus another connected via the rear transition module (RTM). There are four additional Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces for the RTM as well.
More storage is possible via the CPC5910 (see Fig. 2) or the CP5900. The two boards are very similar, supporting a pair of 3.5-in. SATA hard drives. This allows one of these storage blades to host 1 Tbyte of rotating media. The CPC5910 uses off-board controllers such as those found on the CPC5564. The CPC5900 uses an on-board processor and Gigabit Ethernet connection to a PICMG 2.16 fabric to support NAS or SAN interfaces. Both boards have hot swap hard disk drives. RAID 0 or RAID 5 (with multiple blades) is supported.
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