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Microsemi is announcing its new SXP 24G series of devices. This represents the industry’s first 24G SAS (SAS-4) expanders for networked storage and servers. 24G SAS effectively doubles the storage interconnect’s bandwidth, which allows for utilizing the full bandwidth of the PCIe Gen 4 lanes by the storage interconnect. Microsemi’s new series of devices are engineered specifically for demanding SAS storage infrastructure needs, delivering reliable connectivity that is both high-performance and low-power. This new connectivity is available to both SAS and SATA SSDs and HDDs within storage subsystems.
The SXP 24G series also features an enhanced framework for firmware development, which enables users to preserve their investment in firmware in prior generations of Microsemi SAS expanders, allowing faster time to market. The SXP 24G also includes Trusted Platform support, which is a new level of platform security that includes hardware root of trust that is aligned with initiatives such as the Open Compute Security Project.
According to Andrew Dieckmann, Microsemi’s vice president of marketing and applications engineering for their Data Center Solutions business unit, “SAS storage infrastructure continues to be a workhorse for data centers and we are extremely excited to further evolve our highly successful SXP SAS expander franchise this year by sampling the SXP 24G series of products. In addition to being the first SAS expander products in the industry to support the new 24G SAS standard, the SXP 24G products will provide a significant power reduction, and include a wide range of port densities for a large variety of storage architectures while introducing Dynamic Channel Multiplexing (DCM) to enable high efficiency aggregation for lower speed SATA and SAS HDDs and SSDs.”
Key features of Microsemi’s SXP 24G series include:
- Multiple variations of these devices with port densities ranging from 28 ports to 100 ports per device.
- Dynamic Channel Multiplexing (DCM) is an innovative feature that enables full utilization of 24G SAS bandwidth uplinks, even when aggregating 24G SAS, SAS-3, SAS-2 or SATA drives.
- Significantly reduced power consumption as compared to previous generations of expanders.
- Firmware development framework is backwards-compatible with existing SXP products.
Microsemi will be sampling the new SXP 24G with select customers in 2018. For more information on 24G SAS (SAS-4), you can view Microsemi’s overview here. You can also visit with Microsemi this week at Flash Memory Summit 2018 in Santa Clara, California from August 7th through August 9th. You will find them at booth #213.
Stay tuned for further updates as Flash Memory Summit 2018 continues.