Catalyst Introduces STX-460 for 6 Gb/s SAS and SATA Protocol Analysis

SATA I/O Interoperability Workshop, Milpitas, CA, February 28, 2007 - Catalyst Enterprises, Inc., a leading manufacturer of advanced design verification and test tools for Serial ATA (SATA), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), USB 2.0, PCI Express and other high-performance communications technologies, today introduced the STX-460 Analyzer for SAS and SATA protocol traffic at data rates up to 6.0 Gb/s. The STX-460 enables developers to quickly identify problems in their SAS and SATA products and verify a solution for faster time-to-market.

"The migration to SAS and SATA interfaces in the data center is accelerating, in part due to the performance levels that these 6 Gb/s interfaces will provide," said Mark Adams, Catalyst Product Manager for Data Storage Protocol Analyzers. "Catalyst is proud to lead the way in delivering the tools needed for 6 Gb/s product development."

The STX-460 comes with the user interface and feature set found in the widely-adopted STX-431 and STX-231 platforms, including the advanced triggering capabilities that allow users to quickly find and resolve intermittent errors. These triggering options allow STX-460 users to set up to 23 levels of states for isolating error conditions. Each STX-460 has four ports for connecting to host and target devices, and eight systems can be cascaded together to provide up to 32 ports of simultaneous connections. The STX-460 has 4 GB of memory installed for capturing large amounts of protocol traffic within a single trace file. Powerful pre-filtering options enable users to capture only the most meaningful information in every trace.

"We have found the process of debugging SAS errors is greatly accelerated by using the STX analyzers from Catalyst and we are using the STX-460 for our SAS product development projects," said Peter Wong, Director of Strategic Marketing, at PMC-Sierra.

The STX-460 displays captured data in a variety of user-selected formats, including a hierarchical view and chronological views. Search and reporting tools provide easy navigation of large trace files. All Catalyst SAS and SATA protocol analyzers and exercisers enable both storage system and component developers to locate errors and verify a solution quickly and accurately.

About Catalyst Enterprises, Inc.
Founded in 1992 in San Jose, Calif., Catalyst manufactures data bus analysis and emulation tools for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Serial ATA (SATA), PCI Express, USB 2.0 and Wireless USB. Catalyst’s development tools incorporate a reconfigurable hardware core architecture, which can be updated in the field, keeping the tool current with the latest standards and updated feature sets. Catalyst products are used by companies in the data storage, telecommunications, semiconductor, software, consumer electronics, defense, and other industries. Catalyst is a wholly owned subsidiary of LeCroy Corporation (LCRY). Catalyst can be found on the web at www.getcatalyst.com.