Start-up looks to speed data delivery

By Deni Connor
Network World, 04/09/01

Systems and storage start-up Ikadega of Northbrook, Ill., is introducing a server appliance for enterprise networks and service providers that uses a switched-fabric architecture to feed multiple requests to a server's disk for processing, increasing the amount of work the server can handle.

Ikadega's server is built to be installed at the edge of networks or outside corporate firewalls, and used to store large static files such as video, movies or software so users can get at them more quickly. It will work in concert with InfiniBand and other Web or application servers.

"The bottleneck is getting data out of the server," says Vernon Turner of market research firm IDC. "By having a channel architecture [such as Ikadega's], you overcome the latency concerns of bus-based architectures and are able to get large static files faster to the user."

The market for high-power servers and appliances is growing rapidly, Turner says. IDC estimates the market for high-performance servers will be more than $60 billion in 2001, and the appliance server market alone will be around $14 billion by 2004.

Ikadega's appliance incorporates the company's DirectPath architecture. DirectPath is similar to the InfiniBand design from Intel in that it uses multiple I/O channels to get data more quickly to users.

DirectPath differs from InfiniBand, though, in the scope of its design and its purpose. InfiniBand is a general-purpose server meant to ease bottlenecks that even the latest PCI-X-based servers have by creating a switched-fabric backplane that can handle numerous concurrent I/O links.

"[The appliance] gives you more capacity and allows you to deliver it more quickly," says Michele Abrams, a director at Exodus Communications in Seattle. "It also offers an inordinate amount of storage built-in. The two major components of streaming audio and video are bandwidth and storage, so in essence Ikadega is solving an important problem by allocating more of those resources via their appliance."

In traditional bus-based server architectures, user requests for data are made by passing information over buses. An I/O device requires content and requests the data from the CPU, which knows the physical location of the data. The CPU contacts the disk controller, which supplies the data to the memory of the computer. The CPU then tells the I/O device where the data can be located in memory. The I/O device requests the data from memory, completing the data transfer.

Ikadega's DirectPath is not unlike designs from start-ups Cereva or BlueArc that use parallel processing to multiplex data requests to storage.

Ikadega's fabric-based approach is implemented in field-programmable gate arrays at present, but will move to ASIC technology in the future.

In a network using Ikadega's appliance, a user requests information of the Web server, which supplies data from either a back-end database, its own cache of dynamic content or the Ikadega appliance, which stores large files that are downloaded by users. Instead of passing information over the bus and into memory like in a general-purpose server, Ikadega passes it by one of multiple routes in a switched fabric to a controller that knows the location of the data on the disk drive. Once the disk drive retrieves the data, it returns the data directly to the Web server that requested it, bypassing the switched fabric and the disk controller.

The smallest DirectPath appliance will have 1 terabyte of storage capacity; use inexpensive, hot-swappable Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) drives; and be packaged in a 14-inch-high rack-mount configuration. Its storage capacity can be increased to several thousand disks, each of 75G bytes capacity.

Ikadega will ship its DirectPath appliance in October. Pricing has not been determined.

Ikadega: www.ikadega.com.