PMC Delivering 16-port 12Gb SAS and 6Gb SATA Controllers

PMC-Sierra, Inc. said it is the first to ship 16-port 12Gb SAS and 16-port 6Gb SATA I/O controller solutions.

PMC’s data center I/O products enable OEMs and ODMs to design cost-effective customized server hardware for hyperscale deployments, such as Open Compute, Windows cloud Servers, OpenStack and Project Scorpio. The devices have the industry’s highest port density, lowest power and are capable of more than 1,000,000 I/Os per second to support the most demanding cloud software applications.

The product line, which includes eight- and 16-port devices, is optimized for density, power and design flexibility to lower both deployment and development costs and speed time to market.

All devices are pin compatible, enabling three solutions based on one hardware design.

The hardened OS drivers can be leveraged as is or customized with available Linux open source code to a specific application.

The data center I/O controllers, combined with PMC’s SAS expanders, Adaptec by PMC RAID adapters and HBAs, and Flashtec NVMe solutions, provide an end-to-end solution to address the data center storage requirements, including big data, Hadoop, dense SAS and SATA server storage for compute nodes, large scale disk attachment for warm and cold storage, caching to maximize the performance of slower storage media, and RAID for mission-critical data.

“Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT) builds products tailored to specific workloads in the cloud datacenter, and the ability to drive three storage options via one design improves engineering efficiency,” said Mike Yang, GM, QCT. “I/O controller solutions from PMC play an important role in helping us deliver products to market quickly, with the flexibility to support SAS or SATA drive interfaces and higher-density solutions.”

“The diversity of customized solutions that hyperscale data centers are deploying and the demanding density, power and cost requirements present significant challenges to our OEM and ODM customers,” said Pete Hazen, VP of the data center and server group, PMC. “PMC’s I/O controllers are designed to address these challenges. It’s the only solution that enables a three-in-one design, and our higher port count and lower power give our customers the advantage they need in this competitive market segment.“

I/O product line supports PCIe 3.0 spec and includes following devices:

The 16-port controllers enable high density solutions with a single chip, double the density of other products. An end-to-end solution using the I/O controllers and PMC’s expanders is the lowest power in the industry, up to 40% more power efficient than other solutions.

PMC’s flexible and configurable single binary Linux host driver and suite of host drivers enable customization so data center architects can tune for specific applications and use cases.

The controllers will be available in volume production in October 2014.