14 DAY TRIAL // With the performance delivered by today's SSD, there comes the need for newer and faster transfer interfaces to be implemented, so LSI has just showcased the industry’s first 12Gbps SAS expander IC during a recent company event.
The SAS expander uses a series of chips to distribute that bandwidth among current-generation storage devices, in the case of the solution demoed these drives being 32 Seagate Savvio 15.3K RPM hard drives.
The SAS expander gets connected to the system through an x8 PCI-Express 3.0 add-on card that can support up to 44 SAS or SATA devices and up to 2048 SAS addresses.
During the event, LSI was showcasing this solution running IOMeter, where the 32 hard drives achieved a transfer speed of 3106.84 MB/s and over 1.01 million IOPS (the hard drive cache performance was measured).
“12Gb/s SAS components provide the opportunity to extend existing investments in 6Gb/s drive infrastructure while maximizing storage performance for I/O-intensive applications, cloud datacenters and virtualized server environments,” said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager, RAID Storage Division, LSI.
“With PCI Express 3.0 platforms on the horizon and enterprise adoption of solid state drives on the rise, 12Gb/s SAS will be essential to unleashing the full performance potential of next-generation server platforms.”
According to industry estimates provided by LSI, 12Gb/s SAS market adoption will begin with the release of individual SAS components and devices, and gain momentum as tier-one OEMs begin production-volume shipments of 12Gb/s SAS-enabled servers and external storage systems.
Production-volume shipments of 12Gb/s SAS-enabled servers are estimated to occur by early 2013, followed by the availability of external storage systems by mid-to-late 2013.
LSI hasn't provided any information regarding the release schedule of its own 12Gb/s SAS controllers.
