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connectivityZONE Products for the week of August 17, 2009
IDT Says…
PCI Express Gen2 Switches With Integrated Temperature Sensor Functionality
Optimized for high performance applications such as servers, storage and communications/networking
IDT has announced new additions to its family of PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2 switching solutions that provide high performance, line rate throughput and integrate IDT Power Smart technology to solve system-level thermal management challenges in enterprise applications leveraging high-performance networking and storage controllers including 10 gigabit Ethernet and 8 gigabit Fibre Channel devices. Based on IDT proprietary and industry-leading, low-power design techniques, the new devices are the first PCIe interconnect solutions to integrate a temperature sensor. The addition of a temperature sensor provides IDT customers with the critical system-level thermal data necessary to enable optimized power management, load balancing and mitigation of potential thermal-related faults and outages.
The three new devices — a 10-lane, 4-port switch, 12-lane, 3-port switch and 16-lane, 4-port switch — provide high-performance PCIe Gen2 connectivity, and integrate power saving and thermal management features. Employing key power management extensions to the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) PCI Express Base 2.0, the new switches decrease or eliminate thermal management devices and airflow requirements reducing overall system cost and improving time to market through reduced thermal engineering cycles. Further, the integration of temperature sensing functionality enables the devices to provide localized thermal feedback for global system management. Applications of the temperature sensor allow for monitoring of the thermal conditions of the switch to provide feedback on the relative health or loading of the connected system elements enabling intervention to shift traffic patterns for better system resource utilization and to avert any potential thermally induced failures. Additionally, the inclusion of temperature sensor technology offers IDT customers key system development and debug functionality.
“With system I/O speeds and density of systems continuing to rise as the enterprise aggressively migrates to 10GE and 8G Fibre Channel and beyond, thermal management considerations have risen significantly in priority,” said Mario Montana, vice president and general manager of the IDT Enterprise Computing Division. “We worked closely with our customers who manufacture and procure NICs and HBAs to understand their needs and are pleased to deliver a unique solution that fuses organically developed analog technology for temperature sensing to our industry-leading family of PCIe connectivity solutions.”
EN-Genius Says…
These switches are the first family of IDT products released under their Power Smart initiative and are targeted primarily for the high-density cards used for I/O expansion in blade/tower/rack servers. Their ability to monitor their own temperatures is especially useful in the high-density, high bandwidth applications that many of today’s adapter cards can expect to work in. When combined with the switch’s energy-saving they will go a long way towards augmenting the smart chassis management capabilities that are becoming essential for improving both the reliability and energy efficiency of modern data centers.
With the exception of the thermal monitoring capabilities, all the other energy-conscious features in these devices have already appeared in some of their earlier products: such as the 89HPESxxx series (reviewed here December 2007) and their multi-cast, multi-root-capable switch family (reviewed here October 2008), but this is the first time that they are all available together in their higher lane-count devices.
The thermal management sensor is a completely new feature for their PCIe switches. It is based on a precision silicon junction (originally developed for IDT’s DRAM controllers technology) that provides accurate temperature measurement from 0°C to 127.5°C in 0.5°C increments. While much lower resolution (1 - 2°C) would be perfectly adequate for a simple alarm function the higher granularity provided by IDT will prove exceptionally useful for the tighter thermal control and trend monitoring that’s becoming very popular in modern data centers.
Reading the eight-bit temperature from the switches’ internal registers is accomplished via its SMBus (I2C) or PCIe bus which is also used to program and configure its other features. There are three other registers that can be programmed to work as alarm thresholds, which are triggered if the temperature reading falls above or below a preset value. Each threshold register’s status is read as a bit in a register that can be polled and/or programmed to generate an interrupt. The status register also has an optional clear-on-read function that can be used to reset the alarm.
Besides providing an alarm function, the precision temperature data available from the switch can be used to help supplement the thermal data supplied by standard chassis management electronics, with information about local conditions on blades that are not normally available. By adding one or more temperature monitoring points to each blade IDT’s switches could play an important supporting role in generating the feedback that data center operators will use to implement cooling on demand and load balancing schemes that minimize power consumption without overstressing their equipment. The ability to observe individual blade temperatures will also allow operators to identify persistent hot spots, a capability that could prevent or at least mitigate catastrophic events. This is exactly the sort of capability that the the Green Grid Consortium will need as part of the emerging standards for data center energy management it’s developing for the next generation of ultra-efficient servers, compute arrays, and storage systems.
The additional data would be fairly easy to integrate with existing chassis management products like those from Actel/Pigeon Point (last reviewed here May 2008). I was surprised when IDT did not respond with more interest to my suggestion that they work with Actel or one of the other companies involved with chassis management technology to develop the reference code and reference designs that would make them a seamless part of an off-the-shelf thermal protection system.
The new devices are currently sampling and are priced from $24 in production volumes (see table below for details) All of IDT’s new PowerSmart PCIe switches have a dedicated evaluation and development kit for device testing and analysis, and system emulation. Each kit consists of a hardware evaluation board with representative upstream and downstream connectivity, and an IDT-developed, GUI-based software environment that enables the designer to tune system and device configurations to meet system requirements.
Data Sheet (89H10T4BG2)
Data Sheet (89H12T3BG2)
Data Sheet (89H16T4BG2)
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