Addressing high bandwidth storage needs

This new family of devices is specifically designed to meet the demanding SAS storage infrastructure requirements by providing reliable, high performance, low power connectivity to both SAS and SATA HDDs and SSDs within the storage subsystem. 

Andrew Dieckmann, Vice President of Marketing and Applications Engineering for Microsemi’s Data Centre Solutions Business Unit, stated: “SAS storage infrastructure continues to be a workhorse for data centres and we are extremely excited to further evolve our highly successful SXP SAS expander franchise this year by sampling the SXP 24G series of products. In addition to being the first SAS expander products in the industry to support the new 24G SAS standard, the SXP 24G products will provide a significant power reduction, and include a wide range of port densities for a large variety of storage architectures while introducing Dynamic Channel Multiplexing (DCM) to enable high efficiency aggregation for lower speed SATA and SAS HDDs and SSDs.”

Ken Claffey, Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Systems at Seagate, added: “Seagate is excited to extend our collaboration with Microsemi to include 24G SAS solutions. 24G SAS infrastructure is a key enabler for both performance SSD-based and multi-actuator hard drive solutions, as these end points continue to drive bandwidth requirements higher within the data storage architecture.”

Joe Mendolia, Vice President of Marketing at Teledyne LeCroy's Protocol Solutions Group, said: “Excitement is building around 24G SAS as system vendors worldwide are planning their next-generation storage platforms, and the Teledyne LeCroy Sierra T244 analyser is built to support this coming wave of 24G SAS ecosystem build-out. We have worked closely with Microsemi to ensure interoperability and in addition we have integrated full support for Microsemi’s groundbreaking SAS-4 DCM technology in our Sierra T244 analyser.” 

The SXP24G family includes an enhanced firmware development framework that enables customers to preserve their firmware investment in prior generations of Microsemi’s SAS expanders, enabling faster time to market. The devices also feature Trusted Platform support, a new level of platform security which includes hardware root of trust which are aligned with initiatives like the Open Compute Security Project. 

SXP 24G series solution highlights:

• Multiple device variants ranging from 28 to 100 ports per device.
• Innovative Dynamic Channel Multiplexing (DCM) providing full utilisation of 24G SAS bandwidth uplinks when aggregating 24G SAS, SAS-3, SAS-2 or SATA drives.
• Significant power reduction compared to prior generations.
• Firmware development framework backwards-compatible with existing SXP products.

The SmartROC 3200 and SmartIOC 2200 are part of a full end-to-end solution of storage infrastructure and endpoint solutions for PCIe Gen 4 and 24G SAS.

SXP 24G SAS expanders will sample to select customers in 2018.