The increasing performance of storage systems has not been matched - on scale or pace - by the performance of RAID host bus adapters (HBAs). It takes at least two HBAs to create the I/O throughput needed to support systems based on 10Gbps iSCSI, Infiniband and Dual 4 Gbps Fibre Channel technology. Yet when it comes to HBAs and RAID, it is very difficult to combine two or more into a single solution. Cross-system striping, RAID 6 dual-parity schemes, and the need for multiple bus slots means that multiple HBAs are rather inefficient as a means to deliver RAID. What OEMs need are single RAID HBAs that can keep up with the performance pace with the storage networks of today.

The new Areca ARC-1280 PCI Express to SATA II and Fibre to SAS Host Bus Adapters meet this need with extremely strong performance and a sustained transfer rate greater than 776 MB/sec.¹ Several design efficiencies combine to enable these performance metrics, including hardware-accelerated RAID, a new DDR memory bus architecture, and dual-bus configurations, including the addition of a PCI Express slot. Most of these features are made possible by the Intel XScale® architecture-based Intel® IOP341 and two-core Intel® IOP342 I/O processors, which Areca credits with providing the massive throughput needed to close the performance gap.