LSI Demos 12Gb SAS Expander IC

LSI Corporation demonstrated the first 12Gb/s SAS expander IC at the LSI Accelerating Innovation Summit and Technology Showcase in Milpitas, Calif.

The technology demonstration highlights the performance benefits of a 12Gb/s SAS solution with existing 6Gb/s drives compared to an end-to-end 6Gb/s SAS solution. The demo utilizes the next-generation LSI 12Gb/s SAS expander and 12Gb/s SAS I/O controller connected to sixteen 6Gb/s SAS HDDs.

The 12Gb/s SAS solution with 6Gb/s SAS drives in a PCI Express 2.0 system achieved a 65 percent increase in throughput and a 58 percent increase in IOPS (I/O operations per second) performance compared to the end-to-end 6Gb/s SAS storage solution.

"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."

The 48-port 12Gb/s SAS expander supports SAS data transfer rates of 12, 6 and 3Gb/s and SATA data transfer rates of 6 and 3Gb/s. The expander can connect directly to up to 44 SAS or SATA devices, including HDDs and solid state drives, and provides table routing to support connections of up to 2,048 SAS addresses.

The expander incorporates the latest enhancements in SAS technology as well as LSI IP, including End Device Frame Buffering (EDFB) technology. This LSI feature is designed to help facilitate the industry transition to 12Gb/s SAS-enabled systems by allowing users to take advantage of 12Gb/s speeds while utilizing existing 6Gb/s drive and backplane infrastructure. Intelligence in the expander buffers data and then transfers it out to the drives at 6Gb/s speeds in order to match the bandwidth between faster hosts and slower SAS or SATA devices.

According to industry estimates, 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.