LSI introduces 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID® controller cards and expanders

LSI Corporation has introduced its new family of 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID® controller cards and expanders, built to power leading datacentres worldwide. As the proliferation of applications, data and mobile devices continues to place demands on datacentres, the new family of LSI storage solutions offers innovative technology for increased performance and improved enterprise RAID data protection.

LSI’s new storage solutions deliver the application-accelerating performance, enhanced data protection and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) required for the most demanding datacentres. These benefits were validated by recent industry standard transactional processing benchmark study results that showed LSI 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID controller cards delivered a 60 percent increase in database users without performance loss compared with 6Gb/s SAS solutions. In addition, LSI 12Gb/s SAS expanders showed throughput increases of 25 percent in conjunction with the popular Hadoop platform, a significant benefit for customers seeking to process big data.

“As datacentres worldwide face rapidly growing traffic and data consumption, the hardware infrastructure within these systems must provide new levels of performance, reliability and scalability,” said Tom Swinford, senior vice president and general manager, Datacentre Solutions Group, LSI. “The new LSI 12Gb/s SAS storage solutions were designed with these needs in mind, and offer innovative new bandwidth optimisation and diagnostic technologies ideal for larger, more scalable next-generation server and storage systems.”

“Big data growth in systems like Hadoop, scale-out file and object platform systems are important elements for a market that IDC expects will reach about $24B by 2016, with a growth rate of nearly 32 percent CAGR,” said Ashish Nadkarni, director of storage research, IDC. “Storage and internal DAS systems using technology like LSI 12Gb/s SAS solutions will play a critical role in processing and managing big data over the next several years.”
The new 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID 9300 controller card family includes six models, featuring four or eight ports, and the latest PCI Express 3.0 interface. The new controller cards feature a powerful new diagnostic technology that can put the drives into a shielded state, and determine if a drive has failed or can be restored, thereby saving valuable time and money. The 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID 9300 controller cards also support the scaling of hard disk drive (HDD) topologies and maximise the application acceleration benefits of solid state drives (SSDs).

The LSI 12Gb/s SAS expander family spans from 48 to 24 ports with optimised solutions for servers and external storage systems and incorporates the latest enhancements in SAS along with innovative new LSI DataBolt™ bandwidth optimiser technology.Using DataBolt, the 12Gb/s SAS expander family combined with 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID controller cards delivers optimised throughput and facilitates the transition to 12Gb/s SAS-enabled systems by allowing users to gain 12Gb/s host speeds with current-generation 6Gb/s drives.

LSI led the industry by shipping the industry’s first-to-market 12Gb/s SAS HBA cards, RAID-On-Chip (ROC) ICs and I/O controller ICs this year. Now LSI strengthens its position with the introduction of its 12Gb/s MegaRAID SAS controller cards and expanders, delivering a true end-to-end 12Gb/s solution.