Nuts and Volts - January 2009

commercially available, and we have to keep in mind that other promising dye and coating formulations ultimately could not adequately withstand continuous exposure to sunlight. But this could be a significant step forward.

COMPUTERS AND NETWORKING NEW UNIFIED STORAGE APPLIANCE

■ Sun's Storage 7410, top dog in the 7000 family.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SUN MICROS YSTEMS.

Billed as the "world's first unified storage appliances," Sun Microsystems recently introduced the Sun Storage 7000 family of "open storage" devices, designed to "radically simplify storage management and problem solving at breakthrough speed and scale." According to Sun, "These new systems radically simplify the way information is managed and can deliver up to 75% cost/ performance savings to customers. This is the biggest thing to happen to storage in decades."

Three models are available: the 7110 (ultracompact model with 2 TB of storage); the 7210 (mid-range storage featuring up to 48 TB of capacity); and the 7410 (support for up to 0.5 PB of capacity that includes support for read and write optimized SSDs and Sun's Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology).

All of the 7000 systems include comprehensive data services at no extra cost, such as snap/clone, restore, mirroring, RAID- 5, RAID- 6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, HTTP/FTP, and WebDAV. For details, visit www.sun.com. But check your bank account first. The devices start at $10,000 and top off at $89,490 for the 7410 in a clustered 12 TB configuration.

beast. It's a rugged military-grade rackmount computer system based on an ultra high-performance Tyan Thunder n6550EX S4989 Quad AMD Opteron® processor motherboard and an EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics processing unit, which offers two DVI-I outputs with up to 2560 x 1600@ 60 Hz graphics.

Intended for applications where a short depth, light weight, and sturdy rackmount system are required, the system is optimized for installation in transit cases or mobile installations such as aircraft and other vehicles. It meets all appropriate Mil standards for shock, vibration, and environmental specifications, so you can beat it around all you want.

The machine can be configured with up to 128 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 RAM and two 1 TB enterprise-level drives. The single or dual redundant 1,200W power supplies are kept cool by four 120 CFM fans. All this is wrapped in a 5052 high-strength aluminum case. As you might expect, no list price was offered. But if you're interested, you can get a quote via the company's website.

CIRCUITS

AND DEVICES ANY RATE, ANY OUTPUT CLOCK GENERATOR

700 MHz on each of the device's four differential outputs, thus simplifying timing architectures by replacing four discrete phase-locked loop (PLL) devices with a single IC.

Silabs claims best-in-class performance and integration while shortening design cycles for applications such as next-generation communications equipment, wireless base stations, broadcast video, test and measurement, and data acquisition. At 1 ps RMS random jitter typical, the Si5338 can simultaneously generate low jitter clocks for a variety of ICs, including processors, FPGAs, ASICs, memory, and physical layer transceivers. The device generates four differential or eight single-ended outputs per device, eliminating the need for external clock distribution buffers. In addition to frequency, each output clock is independently configurable in terms of supply voltage (1.5, 1.8, 2.5, 3. 3 volts) and signal format (LVPECL, LVDS, CMOS, HCSL, SSTL, HSTL), eliminating the need for external level translators, and reducing BOM cost and complexity.

If you don't need the programmability provided by the Si5338, there is the option of a broad line of Si5334 pin controlled clock generators for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, PCI Express, T1/E1, broadcast video (HDTV),

RUGGED MILITARY COMPUTER INTRODUCED

There may not be much going on in the consumer PC market right now, but the new MQS4U-20A from Chassis Plans ( www.ch assis-plans.com) is a pretty interesting

Silicon Laboratories, Inc. (www. silabs.com), the Austin-based producer of high-performance, analog-intensive, mixed-signal ICs, has introduced a family of clock generators and buffers that provide a high level of frequency flexibility. Based on the company's MultiSynth technology, the Si5338 is capable of synthesizing any frequency from 0.16 to 350 MHz and select frequencies to