LSI AIS 2012: We Get A Quick Look at LSI’s Upcoming 12GB/s Products

In a nondescript ballroom here in San Jose, we almost tripped over LSI’s upcoming 12GB/s MegaRAID products. Though PCIe Gen 3 6gbps offerings are just now becoming mainstream, 12GB/s products are on the horizon — and we got the chance to see one in it’s natural habitat.

This is LSI’s 9271-8i MegaRAID product. Though still some ways from release, we did catch it laying down more than 6,000GB/s with a 30 drive box. You can see the flash cache on top, which uses a super cap system and SLC NAND to keep the cache intact should power fail.

You can see from the IOmeter shot below that it’s running at over 6GB/s, which is quite a bit more than 6gbps on PCIe Gen 3 (we were able to wrangle 4,200MB/s of throughput out of a 9207-8i, but that’s the about the best you can do).

We don’t know much more about it, except that it uses some new technologies and a new HD SAS port array to connect to drives and expanders. It will be some time before these will be seen in the wild, but we’ll be looking for them, hopefully with some new 12GB/s SSDs in tow.