LSI First to Ship New High-Performance 12Gb/s SAS Products

The new products include:

-12Gb/s SAS ROC: LSISAS3108
-12Gb/s SAS I/O Controller: LSISAS3008

At CeBIT, LSI is demonstrating the LSISAS3108 ROC plus MegaRAID 6 technology along with the LSISAS3x48 SAS expander. For those looking to take advantage of 12Gb/s speeds with existing 6Gb/s drive infrastructure, LSI is showcasing DataBolt™ technology, a bandwidth optimizer performance acceleration feature. DataBolt technology, combined with the extended bandwidth of PCIe 3.0, is designed to deliver double the throughput performance while using today’s 6Gb/s SAS or SATA drive solutions. With this feature, DataBolt technology offers product enhancements and future proofing that helps protect customers’ hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) investments.

“The explosive growth of data in cloud and enterprise datacenters drives the need for a higher-performance storage interface that enables more rapid access to data,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research director for Solid State Storage and Enabling Technologies at IDC. “12Gb/s SAS addresses this requirement by doubling the performance of current 6Gb/s SAS-based systems, and helps to unlock the full potential of PCI Express 3.0-based systems and the most recent solid-state storage solutions.”

By doubling the data transfer rate of 6Gb/s SAS solutions, 12Gb/s SAS allows the SAS infrastructure to deliver bandwidth that exceeds that of PCI Express 3.0 with a single host bus adapter (HBA). The improved bandwidth, backed by I/O processing capabilities to maximize link utilization, supports increased scaling of traditional HDDs as well as improved SSD performance. 12Gb/s SAS also provides customers with investment protection with backward compatibility with 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s SAS.

“Today’s announcement underscores LSI’s 12Gb/s SAS leadership as we continue to drive first-to-market solutions for data protection and acceleration,” said Kelly Bryant, vice president of marketing, RAID Storage Division, LSI. “With leading designs and unique capabilities like DataBolt technology, LSI 12Gb/s SAS solutions are designed to deliver the performance required for the most demanding next-generation server and storage platforms.”

Production-volume shipments of the 12Gb/s SAS ROC and 12Gb/s SAS I/O controller are occurring this month, followed by the availability of 12Gb/s SAS expanders, MegaRAID controllers and HBAs in Q2.

Since the inception of SAS, LSI has delivered an industry-leading portfolio of products including SAS ROC, controller and expander ICs, HBAs, MegaRAID and 3ware® RAID controllers, 6Gb/s SAS switches, advanced software options and WarpDrive® SLP-300 acceleration cards. Based on a 25-year track record of hardware and firmware expertise and extensive validation processes, LSI is the SAS product supplier of choice for OEMs that want to deliver a broad set of storage solutions for the highest performance and best ROI.