The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
LSI Corporation has introduced the LSI SAS 9300 host bus adapter (HBA) family, the industry’s first 12Gb/s solution for high performance servers, workstations, and external storage systems. The LSI SAS 9300 HBA family accelerates storage and meets the high performance applications needs for a range of environments including transactional databases, Web 2.0, data mining, and video streaming and editing.
According to LSI, customers are having performance challenges (notably IOPS and bandwidth) from the integration of SSDs into their respective systems. The 12Gb/s solution comes as an answer to that. Since PCI Express 3.0 delivers greater speeds than 6Gb/s, doubling that number allows for greater lane-to-lane bandwidth saturation which is important for protecting customer ROI investments in motherboards – those who pay a premium for PCI Express 3.0 integration are hence assured full-benefits.
The LSI SAS 9300 HBA family has four models and industry-leading performance, with each delivering over 1 million IOPs, a 50% improvement over the previous generation, providing connectivity in a low-profile form factor, 8 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 fast signaling for high bandwidth applications, and high performance with 12Gb/s SAS data transfer rates. Each HBA supports 4 or 8 individual SAS ports, scale-out to support over 1000 devices, can provide over 6,000MB/s of throughput performance for streaming applications, and is optimized with the latest PCI Express 3.0 specification.
LSI HBAs increase performance for business and mission-critical data stored on high-performance SAS hard drives, high-capacity SATA hard drives or application-accelerating SSDs. Each HBA is powered by the LSI SAS 3008 12Gb/s SAS controller, includes mini-SAS HD connectors as specified by the SAS 3.0 Standard, and provides connectivity in a low-profile form factor supporting 8 lanes of PCI Express 3.0. Mini-SAS HD was chosen for its small form factor and ability to deliver 12Gb/s, as well as its advanced technological properties over the standard 8088 SAS connectors.
“Storage infrastructure demands are growing, from I/O intensive applications to cloud datacenters and virtualized server environments,” said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager, RAID Storage Division, LSI. “LSI’s 9300 family host bus adapters are the first 12Gb/s SAS products shipping, allowing customers to immediately unleash the full performance potential of next-generation servers, external storage systems and workstations.”
Being the driving force behind SAS, today’s announcement establishes LSI as the clear industry leader, as well as the first to market 12Gb/s SAS by pushing the standards, and more importantly delivering performance of technological innovations.