LSI Accelerating Innovation Summit – 12Gb/s Revealed

This lack of 12Gb/s devices does leave LSI in an unfortunate situation of having no 12Gb/s storage devices for testing and demonstration. The demonstration for them was two fold, showing the massive capabilities of the new ROC and the expander, but also highlighting the performance gains to be leveraged from existing 6Gb/s infrastructure.

Much like the emergence of 6Gb/s brought forth performance gains even with previous generation (3Gb/s)  devices, the new 12Gb/s specification is going to bring along with it some innovative increases in scalability for existing 6Gb/s infrastructure.

In order to achieve this feat, LSI is utilizing cutting edge SAS technology, including End Device Frame Buffering (EDFB) technology. This technology allows the expander to perform bandwidth aggregation, essentially allowing two devices to share one port on the expander. This in turn allows the adapter to combine the bandwidth and IOPS of two devices, essentially doubling the performance per link. The overhead for the Frame Buffering is handled by the expander itself, maximizing the performance of the controller.

The demonstration also utilizes a new generation of SAS cabling that will utilize two links per SAS connector. This will not only increase the bandwidth per port, but also allow a transition to an easier, more manageable form factor for use in high density applications. The next step will be a release soon of a quad cable, that will further ease cabling complexity.

The key is utilizing the new MiniSAS HD SFF-8644 connector in a backwards compatible format. As you can see the new HD SAS cable can be used with older Mini SAS specification converter cables. The cable in the foreground is the new smaller form factor of SAS cabling, and can easily be identified by the half height connector. This will also begin to be integrated into the current line of 6Gb/s controllers for certain configurations.

In the upclose view it is apparent that the new cable is half height, and the eight port version will simply have a dual connector. What is impressive is that there are two stacked SAS cables inside the MiniSAS HD SFF-8644 cabling, yet they can keep it close to the thickness of the older larger connector behind it.