LSI Extends SAS Leadership with New 6Gb/s SAS External Storage System

LSI Corporation introduced the LSI Engenio® 2600 storage system, an entry-level external storage system based on 6Gb/s SAS technology. The system provides midrange performance and advanced functionality designed to allow small and medium businesses and enterprise remote and branch offices to easily adapt to escalating data volumes and performance requirements without sacrificing simplicity or affordability.

The industry has already shifted to 6Gb/s SAS on the drive side and is beginning to move toward solid deployment of related 6Gb/s SAS storage infrastructures, said John Monroe, research vice president, Storage Markets at Gartner. Systems configured with 6Gb/s SAS on both the drive and the host side should outperform 4Gb/s Fibre Channel alternatives, cost considerably less and consume less power – compelling reasons to make such systems primary choices for upgrading storage infrastructures.

The 2600 system is the newest member of the Engenio line of modular storage systems, and the first to feature 6Gb/s SAS technology. The next-generation storage system builds on the robustness of more than 400,000 storage systems based on LSI Engenio technology that have been deployed across a broad range of environments and industries. The system provides customers with improved performance and scalability, multi-protocol host connectivity, flexible drive support, and advanced energy saving and data security features.

Customers demand storage solutions that boost performance and improve storage utilization and efficiency, said Phil Bullinger, executive vice president and general manager, Engenio Storage Group, LSI. By combining dynamic flexibility with the increased performance and reliability offered by 6Gb/s SAS technology, the Engenio 2600 delivers comparable functionality to Fibre Channel systems while maintaining the lower price point that entry and midrange customers expect.

The Engenio 2600 system combines proven LSI controller technology with leading host interface connectivity to deliver bandwidth up to 4,000 MB/s on sustained reads from disk, a 4X improvement in throughput performance compared to the previous generation product. The system also delivers over 40,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) random disk reads, more than a 2X improvement compared to the prior generation.

The system's balanced and sustainable performance allows it to support a wide range of workloads by being equally adept both at delivering throughput to bandwidth-intensive applications, such as data warehousing and rich media, and delivering IOPS to transaction-oriented applications, such as OLTP and Web servers.

The 2600 system also doubles the capacity of its predecessor by offering pay-as-you-grow scalability up to 96 drives in either 2.5-inch form factors using the new DE5600 2U, 24 drive enclosure or 3.5-inch form factors using the DE1600 2U, 12 drive enclosure.
Mixed host interface and drive support

The Engenio 2600 offers multi-protocol host connectivity, allowing users to take advantage of concurrent direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area network (SAN) implementations. The 2600 system's four native 6Gb/s SAS host interfaces can be intermixed with eight 1Gb/s iSCSI or eight 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) host ports per dual controller. This flexible and multi-purpose dual protocol approach allows organizations to implement a variety of configurations – from rack-mounted server and storage DAS implementations using SAS, to iSCSI and FC SAN environments for larger consolidation and virtualization projects.

The 2600 also offers the ability to intermix drive types to allow organizations to cost-effectively address a wide range of capacity and performance requirements. Customers can deploy high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) or SAS drives for the most demanding application workloads and cost-effective nearline SAS drives for less performance-sensitive, high-capacity applications. Self-encrypting drives are also supported to secure an organization's most sensitive data. The system's flexible drive support and modular scalability help to keep initial costs low while enabling tiered storage for optimized performance and reliability, reduced rack space, lower power and cooling costs and enhanced data security.
Improved energy efficiency and data security

The 2600 system delivers new energy-saving features without impacting performance, scalability or functionality. The system's support for 2.5-inch drives and SSDs, in addition to power supplies that are designed to meet the forthcoming Energy Star, 80 PLUS® energy efficiency and Climate Savers Computing specifications, can result in lower overall annual energy expenditures while still meeting performance requirements.

Utilizing 2.5-inch SAS drives, which are supported by the DE5600 enclosure, the 2600 can deliver up to a 3X improvement in IOPS per watt in power consumption and up to a 134 percent improvement in IOPS performance per U compared to a 3.5-inch drive enclosure.

Advanced data security is provided with support for SEDs utilizing LSI SafeStoreTM Encryption Services, which helps to secure a drive’s data from unauthorized access or modification resulting from theft, loss or repurposing. Fully integrated into LSI SANtricity® ES management software, SafeStore services provide local key management for self-encrypting drives for comprehensive data at rest security throughout the drive's lifecycle with minimal cost and complexity, and without sacrificing storage system performance.