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 The first generation of Serial Attached SCSI—the three gigabit variety—was capable of moving 300 megabytes per second of data. But your enterprise customers want more. And trust us; you want more too. LSI’s brand new line of six gigabit SAS cards doubles the interface’s bandwidth to push 600 megabytes per second. That’s up to 2,400 megabytes per second across a single four-port internal connector.
Resellers who’ve done their homework already know that individual drives don’t even come close to those throughput numbers. But JBODs full of disks sure do. And that’s what LSI’s six gigabit SAS lineup is all about—enabling you with the controllers that let you connect more drives, improve expander compatibility, and set a new performance standard.
All of LSI’s six gigabit controllers share a number of critical specifications, like an 800 MHz RAID-on-chip processor and 512MB of 800 MHz DDR2 memory. The pair combines to serve up hardware-accelerated RAID 0, 1, 5, and 6 support, along with RAID 10, 50, and 60 spans. Optional battery backup helps protect data in flight should the power go out while the storage subsystem is crunching away.
Connectivity is where LSI differentiates one card from another. The MegaRAID SAS 9280-8e, for example, sports eight external ports, ideal for adding JBOD enclosures to an existing storage server. LSI’s MegaRAID SAS 9280DE-8e is very similar, except that it also includes SafeStore Encryption Services, which add an extra layer of security by working with self-encrypting disk drives to control key linkage and authorize the encryption process. The MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i shifts all of its eight ports internally for large, self-contained storage servers with lots of local scalability. And when your customer doesn’t need 4.8 gigabytes per second of aggregate bandwidth, upsell the MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i with four internal six gigabit SAS ports.
There are a handful of reasons beside raw, brutal speed that you’ll want to advocate the move to six gigabit SAS as early as possible. The first is expander self-discovery, which, in layman’s terms, means that you can now daisy chain from a storage server to an external JBOD to another JBOD and so on without worrying about the compatibility issues that affected some first-generation systems. It’s possible to create deep chains, utilizing the immense throughput of each port, and the storage topology will now correctly identify all of the connected drives.
Expander self-configuration is a second catalyst. Simply, logic built into second-generation expanders makes them smarter than what came before. They can communicate with each other in order to determine upstream and downstream data transfers, helping facilitate the previously-mentioned topology discovery.
Finally, you have the interoperability puzzle piece. Design Feedback Equalization is a feature that makes it possible to use three gigabit cables in a six gigabit environment. The hardware is able to determine what that cable was designed to do and automatically extract as much performance as possible from it, even if that means sub-six gigabit speeds. Similarly, you can connect three gigabit drives to six gigabit controllers. And of course, SATA compatibility is still part of the package, too.
Given the improvements wrapped up into LSI’s latest six gigabit SAS controllers, the technology is well-suited to market segments valuing performance, scalability, and reliability. From on-demand video to content creation, medical imaging, and high-performance computing. The storage systems can be larger and faster than ever before. Tie in old three gigabit hardware and roll out new six gigabit storage as you’re customer is ready. So long as there’s an LSI six gigabit controller at the heart of your server, it’ll support the investment already made in three gigabit and the advancements rolled into six gigabit technology.
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