Intel to release storage-specific processor this week

Intel mentioned its storage chip's impending release as part of its announcement Tuesday that it was going to market with its long-awaited high-end Itanium processor, code-named Tukwila.

The Forest Jasper chip, an enhanced version of Intel's Nehalem Xeon chip, is aimed specifically at the data storage and communications market. It is expected to be able to be integrated with PCI Express (PCIe) and to natively create RAID.

The chip is expected to consolidate storage management workloads, such as data deduplication, data snap shots, virtualization and any basic storage management requirements.

Arun Taneja, founder of storage market research firm Taneja Group, said that as general purpose processors add additional cores and specialized functions (such as RAID processing or hardware-based processing of virtualization), the storage systems designer's job becomes easier in that he does not have to attach specialized hardware to get decent performance.

"This could not be happening at a better time since a virtual server supports a lot more than a single application and performs many storage functions that were otherwise performed elsewhere," he said.