Partner Case Study
/ / Early Decision on 64-bit Windows Helps
LSI Logic Meet Market Demand
Overview
Country:United States
Industry:High Technology
Customer Profile
LSI Logic, based in Milpitas, California, is a leading provider of silicon-to-systems solutions used at the core of products that create, move, and store digital information and content.
Business Situation
To retain its leadership position and to meet customer demand, LSI needed to begin work early on creating 64-bit products.
Solution
LSI became an early adopter of the 64-bit Microsoft Windows platform, and today is supplying core components that will help drive adoption of 64-bit Windows systems.
Benefits
64-bit performance helps meet customer needs.
Windows development tools expedite product design.
Moving early to 64-bit products enhances growth potential. / "We are very happy with our overall experience using the tools that Microsoft offers to ensure that our devices will 'just work' with Windows 64-bit products."
Bill Wuertz, Vice President and General Manager, Storage Components Group, LSI Logic
LSI Logic Corporation is a leading provider of silicon-to-system solutions used in products that create, move, and store digital information and content. To meet the demands of some of its major original equipment manufacturers (OEM) customers, such as HP, Dell, and IBM, LSI became an early adopter of Microsoft® Windows® 64-bit technology. Using the rich tools available from Microsoft for 64-bit product development, LSI was able to easily port its products and software drivers from the 32-bit to the 64-bit platform. Embracing the 32- to 64-bit transition has helped LSI strengthen its position as a leading component supplier to customers who are striving to meet the intense market demand for 64-bit Windows products.
Situation
LSI provides a broad range of storage products that include custom- and standard-silicon products, system building blocks, and software. The company's target storage market is OEMs that incorporate LSI products into large systems and computer motherboards.
For several years, LSI has witnessed the surging demand for computing systems that can manage both the explosive growth of data as well as sophisticated software applications. To meet the demands of its OEM customers, LSI knew it had stay on top of developments in 64-bit computing.
"LSI committed early to 64-bit computing for two fundamental reasons," says Bill Wertz, Vice President and General Manager of the LSI Storage Components Group.
"First it was to stay ahead of our competition, and second, to meet our customers' expectations. Today, 64-bit computing is the processing standard for servers—and it's growing on the client side. The market opportunity is significant. Our early commitment to 64-bit computing was consistent with the LSI strategy of leading and driving industry standards and creating first-to-market products."
Solution
To ensure its position in the industry, LSI made a strategic decision to become an early adopter of the Microsoft Windows 64-bit platform. The company has worked closely with Microsoft as well as its OEM customers to ensure that its products are available to support the growth in 64-bit Windows computing.
"The goal of 64-bit Windows computing is to take one of the industry's most important operating systems, both on the server and client side, and open it up to the performance advantages of 64-bit computing," says Laura Cratin, Director of Software Development, Storage Components Group at LSI.
"Almost all systems vendors are now shipping 64-bit capable systems," she adds. "Because of our very early commitment, we were able to retain and even grow our market share for 32-bit products and during the transition to 64-bit computing, because our customers knew we would continue supporting all of their hardware systems."
Benefits
The early decision to build products for 64-bit Windows provides several benefits for LSI. It is able to help its OEM customers accelerate the manufacture of 64-bit Windows systems to meet demand. The Microsoft development tools helped ease the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit products with rich functionality that helped expedite design work. The decision also helped LSI maintain its leadership role in the industry.
Performance Addresses Customer Needs
Steve Hagan, Principal Software Engineer for LSI, says the advent of 64-bit Windows products will help address the increasing number of issues that LSI's customers—and in turn, the corporate customers who use their systems—face with 32-bit systems.
"The 4-gigabit memory limitation in 32-bit systems holds back the kind of system performance that end-user customers want with today's applications," he says. "With 64-bit Windows, customers can use systems that have access to very large memory areas for applications like transaction processing, databases, video processing, and video rendering. The larger memory address space means that device drivers are no longer limited to scarce system resources.
"For large enterprise systems, 32-bit computing has a lot of limitations because of all the swapping of data in and out of disks," he continues. "This problem will be minimized or eliminated with the 64-bit Windows systems. The multithreading 64-bit Windows architecture improves our storage solutions performance, and enhanced encryption capabilities raise the level of security and data protection we can offer in our products."
Rich Tools Expedite Product Design
Using the Microsoft Windows Driver Kit (WDK), the LSI teams were able to increase efficiencies and reduce the cost during driver development.
"The WDK development and build environments are quick to install and easy to use," Cratin says. "All of the tools come prepackaged in the WDK, including cross-compilers and linkers. By following the simple 64-bit porting guide that Microsoft provides, developing and building 64-bit drivers is no different than working with 32-bit drivers."
LSI's development team used rich tools such as PREfast, a static source code analysis tool, and Driver Test Manager (DTM) to quickly identify quality issues throughout development cycles, which in turn reduced the costs of development.
Hagan adds that integration of the PREfast tool and DTM with the development environment enabled LSI developers to use exactly the same tests for unit testing and acceptance testing, which helps locate any bugs that much earlier in the process.
In addition to making development work easier, more efficient, and more cost-effective, Cratin says the WDK also helps reduce the chances of an LSI driver causing a system crash.
Other Microsoft tools, such as DIFx, which simplifies installation of driver packages, will also help LSI deliver extremely reliable products that will enhance customer satisfaction and lower LSI customer support costs.
"We believe that the improved diagnostics and system stability will reduce our support costs," Hagan says. "Microsoft really gave a lot of thought to the tools and approach for designing 64-bit products. For example, the decision by Microsoft to use the Long-Long Pointer 64-bit model was critical to making the job of porting 32-bit drivers to 64-bit very easy. By taking advantage of the Microsoft 64-bit porting guides and WDK documentation, we've been able to get our 64-bit drivers completed in a very short amount of time."
Decision Enhances Growth Prospects
Bill Wuertz, Vice President and General Manager of the Storage Components Group, says that one of the most important aspects of developing in the 64-bit Windows environment using the Microsoft tools is that LSI's products will perform properly.
"We are very happy with our overall experience using the tools that Microsoft offers to ensure that our devices will 'just work' with Windows 64-bit products," Wuertz says. "The tools are easy to access and easy to use. We believe they will not only make our customers' experience with our product a better one, but that we will see clear benefits in development costs and customer support."
Wuertz adds, "Making the commitment to 64-bit computing early on put LSI in a great position to ride the wave of growth from Microsoft Windows VistaTM. LSI's devices work effortlessly with Windows Vista and are already testing with the beta releases. We're very happy with our decision to be prepared early. It's smart business and an absolute requirement in the highly competitive storage market."
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