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Systems and components for storage include the following: - Host Bus Adapter (HBA). Typically an adapter card to bridge from a system bus to a storage interconnect (e.g. Fibre Channel, SCSI).
- Network Attached Storage (NAS). A storage device accessed through a network to provide centralized data access and storage.
- Storage Area Network (SAN). A network architecture that attaches remote storage devices via channels such as SCSI or Fibre Channel so that they may be accessed by servers on the network - appearing as locally attached drives.
For devices that need to interface with controllers that use PCI/X (e.g. SATA or SCSI controllers) to PCI Express (PCIe) on the host processor or root complex, a PCIe to PCI/X Bridge like the Tsi384™ is required. 
Another application for the Tsi384 is providing the PCIe interface on a host bus adapter card (HBA). In such applications maximum data throughput and minimal delay in responding to requests to read and write data are critical. 
In some cases, an intelligent adapter board is used to extend the I/O capability of the host board and off-load the processing tasks required for the I/O devices. This is achieved by using an embedded processor on the device that controls and communicates with the other devices on the PCI/X bus. One example is a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) adapter. In this case the embedded processor handles the processing functions to perform RAID on a SCSI disk controller, off-loading the host from these tasks.
In such designs the embedded processor needs to operate and control devices on the secondary bus without interference from the host processor. A bridge operating in transparent mode would expose devices on the card to the host upon system initialization and it would attempt to initialize and control them. To prevent this, a bridge that supports non-transparent bridging such as the Tsi384 is required.
Storage systems require large data bandwidth between cards that make up the system. The high data rates between cards makes the application well suited for high bandwidth peer-to-peer communication protocols such as RapidIO®.
Storage Systems require high bandwidth between the various cards, such as Disk Cache cards, Disk Interface Cards, SAN/WAN interface cards and Management Cards which control the entire system. With a RapidIO Solution the following are achieved:
- High backplane bandwidth (4-10 Gbps)
- Robust backplane electricals
- True peer-to-peer communication in a multiple processor system
- High availability
- Data streaming between processing elements
- 2-3x cost savings per port for 10 Gbps
- Combine data and control plane traffic
- 20% more data bandwidth than a PCIe backplane.
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