WindRiver Enables Storage Appliance Development

By Michael Foley
iApplianceWeb
(05/21/01, 09:48:45 AM EDT)

Wind River Systems, Inc., following the trend of other embedded Operating System (OS) vendors, has released a software platform to speed the development of Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) appliances. Tornado for Intelligent Network Acceleration (TINA) is an integrated software platform for the LAN and storage networking markets. With the vast explosion of data, the storage device market is growing at a fast rate. Multimedia data in particular requires enormous storage space and will drive this market as it grows.

TINA's reference design is built on Intel I/O processors with Intel XScale Microarchitecture and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. TINA provides a platform that leverages gigabit speeds and replaces the current Fibre Channel transport in the data center. Additionally, TINA supports emerging IP-based storage technologies such as intelligent small computer system interface (iSCSI).

TINA includes the Tornado integrated development environment and the IxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS). IxWorks is a derivative of the VxWorks RTOS and shares the same kernel and full application programming interface (API). IxWorks has been customized for high-throughput I/O environments. TINA also includes a reference board based on the Intel 80200 processor with Intel XScale Microarchitecture. An application development kit will be made available later in the year to support third party software development.