6Gb SAS-to-SATA Bridge and 16-Port SAS Storage Processor Sampled by LSI

LSI Corporation announced significant extensions to its SAS portfolio with the introduction of the industry’s first 6Gb/s SAS-to-SATA bridge cards and 16-port SAS storage processor. The new 6Gb/s SAS components for external storage applications extend the industry’s broadest portfolio of SAS solutions. Major OEMs are sampling the new 6Gb/s SAS products to gain a time-to-market advantage for the deployment of next-generation SAS infrastructure solutions.

The new 6Gb/s SAS-to-SATA bridge cards allow SAS capabilities to be seamlessly added to existing SATA disk drives. The cards enhance SATA drives with essential enterprise-class features, providing OEMs with a complete turnkey solution for interconnecting low-cost, high-capacity SATA drives into enterprise storage solutions – without sacrificing reliability, manageability or data availability.

 
LSISS9252

"The cost and capacity benefits of SATA drives are well known, but deployment in enterprise storage environments has been limited due to scaling and reliability concerns," said Steve Fingerhut, senior director of marketing, Storage Components Group, LSI. "With today’s announcement, LSI is supplying OEMs with a first-to-market solution for increasing storage system capacity at a lower cost, using OEM customers’ robust, scalable SAS infrastructure."

The new LSISS9252 and LSISS9253 SAS-to-SATA bridge cards, which are for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, respectively, consist of fifth-generation LSITM AAMUX (Active-Active Multiplexer) technology, a dual-ported SAS host interface and SATA device interface. The LSI bridge technology is designed to enable single-ported SATA drives to connect seamlessly like native dual-ported SAS drives for use in enterprise storage systems using SAS expanders. The cards are completely designed, manufactured and warranted by LSI, providing OEMs with a reduced total cost of ownership and time-to-market advantage.

The cards support full SAS SSP protocol to the host, thereby removing SATA commands and signaling from the SAS domain. This helps to eliminate SATA affiliation issues associated with the multi-initiator configurations that are critical to enterprise deployments. In addition, two unique SAS addresses per host port help to eliminate any failover issues with the SATA drives. The cards support auto-speed negotiation (6, 3 and 1.5Gb/s SAS/SATA I/O) and Native Command Queuing, and are backward compatible with first-generation SATA I/O and 3Gb/s SAS. The cards support SATA disk drives independent of speed and capacity, and are universally compatible with third-party SAS controllers and expanders.

"Hitachi has been active in the development of 6Gb/s SAS, so we are pleased to collaborate with LSI to promote the new interface standard," said Brendan Collins, vice president, Product Line Management, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "SAS-to-SATA bridge cards will make it easier to design a single, configurable storage solution that meets a broad range of price, performance and scalability requirements. The configuration flexibility will result in storage systems that include a combination of SAS drives optimized for performance, and SATA drives that deliver high capacity and a low-cost-per-gigabyte for nearline storage and other lower duty cycle applications."

LSI is demonstrating a 6Gb/s SAS-to-SATA bridge solution this week at Storage Networking World in Dallas, Tex., booth #501.
16-port SAS storage processor for external storage

The new LSISAS2116 is the industry’s first single-chip, 16-port SAS storage processor for external storage systems. It integrates a PowerPC application processor, x8 PCI Express 2.0 with root complex, support for 8GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory, and 16 ports of 6Gb/s SAS to provide users with enterprise-class performance and features.

With its unique combination of features, the LSISAS2116 provides the benefits of reduced component count and flexibility in the design of host-side interface connections, enabling SAS-to-SAS, Fibre Channel-to-SAS, and iSCSI-to-SAS external storage solutions. The LSISAS2116 solution also supports both initiator and target modes, further extending the connectivity implementation options. These features greatly improve performance while reducing power consumption and system cost in comparison to discrete components.

Since the inception of SAS, LSI has delivered market-leading SAS solutions across a broad portfolio of controller ICs, expanders, host bus and MegaRAID adapters, RAID-on-motherboard solutions and storage systems.

More information on the LSI SAS portfolio