Raritan's Peppercon Introduces KIRA(TM)100 -- Industry's First Chip to Provide Complete Remote Platform Control Supporting Key Manageability Standards
-- Reduces Costs and Increases IT Management Productivity for End Customers --
ZWICKAU, Germany, Nov. 15 / -- Peppercon AG, Raritan's(R) OEM division and a leading vendor of embedded KVM-over-IP solutions, today announced the KIRA(TM)100 -- the industry's first single chip solution for high-quality platform control and remote server access to combine KVM-over-IP technology with all the key platform manageability access methods.
For end customers, the multi-standard, high-performance KIRA100 chip minimizes server downtime and increases IT productivity by enabling operating system installation, BIOS upgrade and power cycling on a server to be done remotely. In addition, the ASIC-based chip helps Tier-One server partners and server OEMs save board space and reduce system costs.
The KIRA100 supports all standardized access protocol methods in the marketplace, including IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), SSH (Secure Shell), WS-Management (Web Services Based Management Protocol) and SMASH-CLP (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware-Command Line Protocol).
In addition to its excellent KVM-over-IP redirection, Peppercon's KIRA100 provides virtual media support that covers a broad range of mass storage emulation variations -- including virtual-floppy emulation, CD/DVD-drive emulation and even direct mass-storage redirection. Additionally, it offers advanced features to prevent downtime, such as health management consisting of IPMI2.0-based server hardware monitoring.
"With KIRA100, Peppercon demonstrates its unwavering focus on providing a state-of-the-art feature set for best-in-class platform control to its OEM customers," said Swen Anderson, CTO at Peppercon.
"The KIRA100 offers OEM customers a very powerful, modular and flexible way to tailor-make server platform designs in order to meet the specific needs of their customers. We applaud and support all efforts to create common platform interface standards, such as Open Platform Management Architecture (OPMA) and Advanced System Management Interface (ASMI). KIRA100 is flexible enough to serve as the manageability engine for cards that support the different capabilities of each of these standards, thus helping our customers reduce cost and time to market."
"Peppercon's KIRA100 ASIC has the potential to build upon the success achieved by their OPMA M3-Module which is offered to original equipment manufacturers today," said Marty Seyer, Corporate Vice President, Commercial Business and Performance Computing, AMD. "In addition to the industry-leading performance-per-watt delivered by the AMD Opteron(TM) processor with Direct Connect Architecture, AMD's enterprise server customers will continue to benefit from innovative third-party solutions that support open, royalty-free platform interface standards like OPMA."
Peppercon's OPMA M3-Module was the industry's first management subsystem to support the OPMA standard.
"Our OEM customers are now able to build support for improved server management into their systems with the confidence that solutions such as Peppercon's ASMI-based card will complete the solution," said Hemant Dhulla, General Manager of Intel's Manageability and Platform Software Division. "This design helps to optimize operating costs and to protect investment for Intel server board manufacturers and enables enterprise management software solutions to easily communicate with a large number of ASMI-based platforms."
About the KIRA100 Single Chip Solution:
The KIRA100 baseboard management controller (BMC) is a fully integrated system-on-a-chip microprocessor, which incorporates all the necessary function blocks and interfaces to provide a complete and cost-effective remote management solution that fits all server management architectures. The KIRA100 is based on a 32-bit, high-performance, lower-power 920T ARM Architecture V4 RISC microprocessor. It is equipped with a media co-processor to accelerate video processing, and a comprehensive set of system and peripheral functions that are useful in a variety of remote management applications.
Key features include:
o ARM 920T V4-compliant RISC CPU with 16kByte Data / Instruction cache, running at a maximum clock speed of 200 MHz.
o Video Sampling Controller (VSC2) function block to accelerate video processing and compression for outstanding KVM-over-IP performance (30fps), supporting maximum video resolutions of up to 1600x1200@75Hz.
o Two integrated USB high-speed device and OTG interfaces with build-in USB-PHY to support keyboard, mouse and mass storage emulation without additional external components.
o Two integrated MII LAN interfaces and one FSB interface to support dedicated, as well as shared, NIC server architectures.
o Flexible high-performance memory controller to support a variety of static and dynamic memory components, including serial flash components (SPI).
o Integrated AES / 3DES-compliant encryption controller to ensure secure remote management sessions.
o IPMI2.0-compliant BMC interfaces, which include UART, LPC, I2C, Tacho, PWM and GPIO interfaces.
o A core part of the KIRA100 ASIC is based on industry-leading structured ASIC technology, which enables easy customization of function blocks according to customer demands or new industry standards.
About Peppercon AG:
Peppercon, based in Zwickau, Germany, develops, produces and markets innovative and advanced microprocessor-controlled remote maintenance and remote management products. Its solutions focus on providing cost efficiency, economy of space, light weight, modularity and usability, and are designed for SOHO (Small Office Home Office) as well as for corporate markets. Peppercon products are designed to increase the availability of servers, networking, telecom and industrial equipment and of mission-critical applications, resulting in enormous cost savings and reduction of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). In April 2004, Peppercon became a wholly owned subsidiary of Raritan. (Somerset, N.J., USA). Peppercon's products are distributed worldwide by OEMs and by Raritan via an international network of distributors. Homepage: http://www.peppercon.com/
