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Today at the LSI Accelerating Innovation Summit we were pleased to witness the unveiling of the first working silicon featuring the new 12Gb/s specification.
Utilizing the new SAS expander IC, LSI was able to demonstrate speeds in excess of 1 million IOPS from a one adapter solution.
The new controller series, featuring the 12Gb/s LSI ROC, makes its debut in an impressive show of power.
Perhaps most telling in this demonstration was the use of 6Gb/s devices in the demo. With the 12Gb/s specification in its infancy, LSI is far ahead of the game, developing the core underlying technologies to usher in this new technology. The first layer of the foundation begins with providing the industry with the infrastructure to move forward, this being in the form of the controller and the expander to connect the devices into the host system.
Here we can see the controller topping out at one million IOPS, powered by a single next-generation LSI 12Gb/s SAS expander and 12Gb/s SAS I/O controller. The 12Gb/s SAS solution with 6Gb/s SAS drives in a PCI Express 2.0 system achieved a 65 percent increase in throughput and a 58 percent increase in IOPS (I/O operations per second) performance compared to the end-to-end 6Gb/s SAS storage solution.
Here we can see performance of 3.1 Gb/s easily handled with only one x4 link to the controller. Bear in mind that these are results with only one link, the controller can easily double this performance.
This results in some extreme performance gains out of the box with existing 6Gb/s deployments, to the tune of a 58% increase in IOPS, and up to 65% increase in Bandwidth.
I knew that it was just a matter of time before LSI themselves would be coming out with their own “updated” RAID controller and would be jumping head-first into the extreme 6Gb/s party in light of the prior article regarding Areca’s 1882x 2nd Gen SAS SATA Raid Card review – being as that card was based upon an LSI 2208 Dual Core ROC proc.
Now, we’re seeing LSI stepping it up a few more notches – over and above the Areca solution — with with this flavor of their own dedicated PCI-e ROC solution – and BOY, does this look sweet or what!
Holy-crap Batman, 12-Gb/s!!! That is quite speedy.
(Of course, no pricing announcements just yet at this early stage (gulp!) — thus, we could be faced with sticker-shock once this goes RTM).
Thanks for the great review . . . you’re always following that bleeding-edge; that’s what I love about TheSSDReview!
Keep up the great work.
SATA 12Gb/s, can’t wait for it. Imagine buying a new laptop with 1.