LSI to Sample 6Gbs SAS Expanders to OEMs

LSI Corporation announced the industry’s first sample shipments of
6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expander ICs to major OEM customers,
further strengthening its leadership position in the SAS market. By
providing OEMs with samples of its second generation SAS expander IC
products, LSI is laying the groundwork for complete 6Gb/s SAS
ecosystems, which the SCSI Trade Association estimates will be
available in the second half of 2009.

"Serial Attached SCSI has penetrated both the server and storage
markets and volumes of 3Gb/s SAS solutions are still ramping," said
Bill Wuertz, senior vice president of LSI Storage Components Group.
"While LSI continues to provide and augment our industry leading
portfolio of 3Gb/s SAS products to serve this market, we’re also
looking to the future. With our superior development and validation
processes and focus on interoperability testing, we are able to provide
OEMs with robust 6Gb/s SAS expanders that reduce risk and lay the early
foundation for the SAS-2 infrastructure."

The LSI SAS2x36 is a 36-port 6Gb/s SAS expander with an integrated
ARM processor for topology management functions such as discovery and
enclosure services. It supports SAS and SATA data transfer rates of
1.5, 3, and 6Gb/s and incorporates enhanced features such as Spread
Spectrum Clocking for EMI reduction, T10-based zoning for network
storage security applications, and SAS multiplexing to maximize
bandwidth performance to legacy storage devices. The LSI SAS2x36 SAS
expander provides storage environments with the ability to connect
multiple hosts and targets through a switched device for scalability
and with fault-tolerant path-redundancy to improve system reliability
ideal for today’s enterprise data centers.

"Enterprises need storage solutions that deliver new levels of
performance, reliability and scalability across increasingly diverse
applications ranging from retail transactions, to real-time business
analytics, to delivery of content-on-demand," said Richard Villars,
vice president of storage systems research at IDC. "Technologies, such
as 6 Gb/s SAS, will play an important role in meeting these emerging
enterprise storage requirements. Leading storage solutions providers
such as LSI that are making 6 Gb/s SAS products available for
interoperability and validation testing will help speed the transition
to more powerful storage solutions."

6Gb/s SAS will provide up to double the transfer rate of 3Gb/s SAS
solutions and offer greater scalability, while also providing new
features including expander zoning, spread spectrum clocking and
support for the T10 Protection Information Model for greater
reliability, Decision Feedback Equalization for longer cables, and
multiplexing. SAS-2 will also provide customers with investment
protection by providing backward compatibility with 3Gb/s SAS
technologies.

LSI
Corporation