Intelligent Peripheral Interface (IPI) was a server-centric storage interface used in the 1980s and early 1990s with an

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

-9318 standard. designed for

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

s from IBM,

Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the N ...

, and

Unisys Unisys Corporation is a global technology solutions company founded in 1986 and headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. The company provides cloud, AI, digital workplace, logistics, and enterprise computing services. History Founding Unis ...

. It replaced Storage Module Device (SMD) as the hard disk drive interface for very large hard disks. The idea behind IPI is that the disk drives themselves are as simple as possible, containing only the lowest level control circuitry, while the IPI interface card encapsulates most of the disk control complexity. The IPI interface card, as a central point of control, is thus theoretically able to best coordinate accesses to the connected disks, as it "knows" more about the states of the connected disks than would, say, a

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

interface. IPI supports cable lengths up to . An IPI-2 bus can provide a data transfer rate in the vicinity of 6 MB/ s. In practice, the theoretical advantages of IPI over SCSI were often not realized, as they only materialized when several disks were connected to the interface, which could then easily become a bandwidth bottleneck. IPI systems were often shipped by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

on original sun4 architecture servers, but the above limitation and reliability problems made them unpopular with customers, and the technology basically disappeared by the second half of the 1990s.

References

Computer storage buses Interfaces {{compu-storage-stub

See also

References