ATTO Technology

Last updated
ATTO Technology, Inc.
Company typePrivate
Industry Storage
FoundedNovember 11, 1988;35 years ago (1988-11-11)
Headquarters Amherst, New York, United States
Key people
Tim Klein, President and CEO
David Snell, CTO and Vice President of Engineering
Website www.atto.com

ATTO Technology, Inc. is a manufacturer of storage connectivity products for data-intensive computing. ATTO manufactures Fibre Channel and SAS/SATA host bus adapters, RAID adapters, Fibre Channel switches, protocol conversion bridges, storage controllers, MacOS iSCSI initiator software and acceleration software with storage interface connectivity to SATA, SAS, Fibre Channel, Thunderbolt devices, Ethernet and NVMe.

Contents

History

1988: Founding

The company was founded in 1988 by Timothy J. Klein and David A. Snell, and is headquartered in Amherst, New York. [1] All ATTO products are engineered and assembled in the United States. It is estimated that ATTO has delivered more than 2.5 million products to the market segments in a broad range of storage applications and environments. [2]

1989–95: First Products

SiliconDisk ATTO SiliconDisk.tif
SiliconDisk

The first ATTO product was the SiliconDisk, a SCSI-based solid-state disk, released in 1989. The company received its first OEM contract with Kodak shortly thereafter, in 1990. [3] In 1992, ATTO introduced the ISA, EISA and MicroChannel (MCA) host bus adapters for the PC market at the Comdex trade show. By 1995, ATTO added to its product line with the introduction of the ExpressPCI SCSI-3 Accelerator, which received the MacUsers Editor's Choice award that year. [4]

1996–2008: New Technologies

ATTO released its Fibre Channel host bus adapters, bridges and hubs in 1996. In 1999, it introduced its first enterprise-class ATA-based RAID storage array. In 2002, the company released the iPBridge, an iSCSI to SCSI bridge. In the early 2000s, ATTO started a focus on the Fibre Channel market, developing and releasing the Celerity line of Fibre Channel host bus adapters in 2003 with 1 GB connectivity. By 2005, ATTO expanded its Celerity offerings with the 4 GB host bus adapters, as well as introducing the FibreBridge storage controller for data centers and the FastStream Fibre Channel RAID controllers. In 2007, ATTO stepped into the SAS/SATA market with ExpressSAS RAID and host bus adapters. The following year, ATTO released 8 GB Fibre Channel and 6Gb ExpressSAS adapters, and in 2009 the company rolled out the first 8 GB Fibre Channel storage controller. ATTO introduced its FibreConnect family of switches in 2010 and introduced a revised product in 2012, providing scalable, end-to-end SAN connectivity. In 2011, ATTO released its first FastFrame network interface cards and converged network adapters, enabling connectivity to Ethernet networks. In 2012, ATTO introduced its ThunderLink and ThunderStream devices, the company's first Thunderbolt enabled products.

2015–Present: New Developments

By 2015, ATTO had expanded its FastFrame offering to include both 10 GB and 40 GB Ethernet connectivity, in single-, dual- and quad-port configurations. The following year, 2016, was a banner year for ATTO, introducing both 32 GB and 16 GB Gen 6 Celerity host bus adapters and debuted the renamed XstreamCORE storage controller, replacing all but a few of its Fibre Channel storage controllers. At the same time, ATTO's ExpressNAV software was rebranded as XstreamVIEW. ThunderLink and ThunderStream Thunderbolt connectivity devices now support Thunderbolt 2 and Thunderbolt 3 platforms and provide connectivity to 6 GB SAS/SATA RAID, Fibre Channel and 10 GB Ethernet networks. Thunderbolt 3 to 40 GB Ethernet and both 32 GB and 16 GB Fibre Channel products were also introduced.

Architecture

With the introduction of XstreamCORE ATTO launched two new technologies to help their products stand out against competing architectures. xCORE IO Acceleration features multiple parallel IO acceleration engines with end-to-end IO processing, hardware buffer allocation management and real-time performance and latency analytics. These features combine to provide very high, reliable throughput and IOPS with deterministic latency of under 4 microseconds. Unlike general purpose processor based architectures xCORE maintains performance and latency as services and features are added. This is accomplished with the help of ATTO's other new technology the eCORE Control Engine. The eCORE offloads non-data related commands from xCORE and adds common, open storage services, integrates with industry standard APIs, manages reservations, storage routing and host and mapping functions. The eCORE Control Engine also manages traffic for data mover offload with added error handling and diagnostic tools. These features add value to JBOD, JBOF or RAID storage while providing tight integration with server based software.[ citation needed ]

Products

ATTO products are sold directly to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), ODMs, White Box Systems Integrators as well as through ATTO authorized distributors and resellers. Products include: acceleration software, RAID Adapters, and host bus adapters (HBAs) 8 GB, 16GB and 32 GB Fibre Channel, 12 GB and 6 GB SAS/SATA, and Network Interface Cards (NICs) 40 GbE and 10 GbE. NetApp is a customer of ATTO and has integrated the ATTO FibreBridge product line in the NetApp MetroCluster business continuity solution.

Protocol conversion products, called storage controllers, convert one protocol to another while adding monitoring and management features, for example: Fibre Channel to SAS/SATA, iSCSI to SAS/SATA. Switches are also offered which provide 8, 16, 24, or 48 ports in 16 GB or 8 GB Fibre Channel to enable an end-to-end SAN solution when using Fibre Channel HBAs.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SCSI</span> Set of computer and peripheral connection standards

Small Computer System Interface is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced in the 1980s and has seen widespread use on servers and high-end workstations, with new SCSI standards being published as recently as SAS-4 in 2017.

Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. iSCSI facilitates data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. It can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SATA</span> Computer bus interface for storage devices

SATA is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to become the predominant interface for storage devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Host adapter</span> Computer hardware device

In computer hardware, a host controller, host adapter, or host bus adapter (HBA), connects a computer system bus, which acts as the host system, to other network and storage devices. The terms are primarily used to refer to devices for connecting SCSI, SAS, NVMe, Fibre Channel and SATA devices. Devices for connecting to FireWire, USB and other devices may also be called host controllers or host adapters.

A disk array controller is a device that manages the physical disk drives and presents them to the computer as logical units. It almost always implements hardware RAID, thus it is sometimes referred to as RAID controller. It also often provides additional disk cache.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clariion</span> Storage array product

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serial Attached SCSI</span> Point-to-point serial protocol for enterprise storage

In computing, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is a point-to-point serial protocol that moves data to and from computer-storage devices such as hard disk drives and tape drives. SAS replaces the older Parallel SCSI bus technology that first appeared in the mid-1980s. SAS, like its predecessor, uses the standard SCSI command set. SAS offers optional compatibility with Serial ATA (SATA), versions 2 and later. This allows the connection of SATA drives to most SAS backplanes or controllers. The reverse, connecting SAS drives to SATA backplanes, is not possible.

Brocade was an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company is known for its Fibre Channel storage networking products and technology. Prior to the acquisition, the company expanded into adjacent markets including a wide range of IP/Ethernet hardware and software products. Offerings included routers and network switches for data center, campus and carrier environments, IP storage network fabrics; Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) markets such as a commercial edition of the OpenDaylight Project controller; and network management software that spans physical and virtual devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">QLogic</span> American network device manufacturer

QLogic Corporation was an American manufacturer of networking server and storage networking connectivity and application acceleration products, based in Aliso Viejo, California through 2016. QLogic's products include Fibre Channel adapters, converged network adapters for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Ethernet network interface controllers, iSCSI adapters, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). It was a public company from 1992 to 2016.

A SCSI connector is used to connect computer parts that use a system called SCSI to communicate with each other. Generally, two connectors, designated male and female, plug together to form a connection which allows two components, such as a computer and a disk drive, to communicate with each other. SCSI connectors can be electrical connectors or optical connectors. There have been a large variety of SCSI connectors in use at one time or another in the computer industry. Twenty-five years of evolution and three major revisions of the standards resulted in requirements for Parallel SCSI connectors that could handle an 8, 16 or 32 bit wide bus running at 5, 10 or 20 megatransfer/s, with conventional or differential signaling. Serial SCSI added another three transport types, each with one or more connector types. Manufacturers have frequently chosen connectors based on factors of size, cost, or convenience at the expense of compatibility.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fibre Channel over Ethernet</span> Computer network technology

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. This allows Fibre Channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks while preserving the Fibre Channel protocol. The specification was part of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards T11 FC-BB-5 standard published in 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Storage area network</span> Network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dell M1000e</span> Server computer

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ThunderLink is a legacy expansion adapter for the Thunderbolt computer bus interface, which added support for SAS, SATA, fibre optic and Ethernet interfaces.

Hard disk drives are accessed over one of a number of bus types, including parallel ATA, Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel. Bridge circuitry is sometimes used to connect hard disk drives to buses with which they cannot communicate natively, such as IEEE 1394, USB, SCSI, NVMe and Thunderbolt.

In an enterprise server, a Caching SAN Adapter is a host bus adapter (HBA) for storage area network (SAN) connectivity which accelerates performance by transparently storing duplicate data such that future requests for that data can be serviced faster compared to retrieving the data from the source. A caching SAN adapter is used to accelerate the performance of applications across multiple clustered or virtualized servers and uses DRAM, NAND Flash or other memory technologies as the cache. The key requirement for the memory technology is that it is faster than the media storing the original copy of the data to ensure performance acceleration is achieved.

References

  1. "ATTO found niche in data-storage market - Business - The Buffalo News". Archived from the original on 2016-09-15.
  2. "Company History | ATTO".
  3. "University at Buffalo - inventors-entrepreneurs-flyer.pdf" (PDF). www.buffalo.edu.
  4. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+winner!+ATTO's+ExpressPCI+(MC)+SCSI-3+accelerator+captures...-a017913940 [ dead link ]