Magma EB7R-x8 User Manual

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The growing demand for storage solutions in the past few years was 
one of the major catalysts behind the exponential growth in hard drive 
capacity. Moreover, a new breed of faster and more efficient interfaces 
have emerged in order to provide higher throughput while maintaining 
the lowest possible delays in 
accessing our data. 
One such solution is ATTO 
Technology’s FC-44ES Fibre 
Channel PCIe controller. It can 
reach data transfer rates of up 
to 800MB/sec per channel when 
taking full advantage of the PCI 
Express bandwidth. 
But what if this impressive performance is still not enough to satisfy a 
bandwidth-hungry application such as a multi-dimensional database, or 
a high-definition, real time, video streaming broadcast? In that case, the 
EB7 becomes an obvious solution by allowing the user to combine up to 
7 Fibre Channel controllers into one system, which, in turn, only 
compromises a single PCIe slot out of the ones available in the host 
computer.        
Assuming we acquired the necessary hardware (controllers, the fiber 
medium and an array of high-speed storage devices) the question that 
arises is: How can we quantify the power of multiple controller cards? 
The answer lies in an open-source application, vastly popular among 
those working in the storage industry: Iometer®  (see screenshot below) 
Iometer® is a software-based I/O exerciser capable to test and 
characterize stand-alone as well as clustered storage systems.