Intel announces Nehalem processor aimed at storage, communications

Intel Corp. today announced it will ship an enhanced version of its dual-processing Nehalem Xeon chip aimed specifically at the data storage and communications market with the ability to natively create RAID and is integrated with PCI Express (PCIe).

The processors, due out in December, are aimed at applications such as ultra-dense blades, IPTV, VoIP, network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN).

Intel first debuted its Nehalem-based Xeon microprocessor in April.

The new Jasper Forest processors are capable of configuring storage as a RAID 5 or 6, protecting against single- or dual-disk failure, respectively.

"Nehalem cores are quite powerful, but customers still want to be able to offload storage functions to a core, especially when you get down into two-core and single core versions of processors, really simplifies the architecture," said Seth Bobroff, general manager of Intels Server Platforms Group.

:stroy: Full story: Computerworld