LSI Accelerating Innovation Summit – 12Gb/s Revealed

Another key component of this new level of performance is the move to PCI-E 3.0 for connection into the host system. With PCI-E 3.0 coming into the datacenter, LSI is wisely becoming the first to utilize the enhanced bandwidth opportunities.

As exciting as the numbers are in this next slide, one has to also be excited about what the future of this generation holds. Boasting speeds of 1.2Million IOPS and Bandwidth of 6400 MB/s on a PCI-E 3.0 connection is truly astounding. This early in the development of the prototype this is great progress, and the maturation of the technology will likely bring about even greater improvements.

It seems that Moores law is alive and well, as it was not long ago that 150,000 IOPS was big news, and we were just breaking ground on 6Gb/s. Now they are knocking on the door, or knocking it down in this case, of 1 Million IOPS per device!

The challenge with any new generational shift is to translate that into a cohesive unit that is going to deliver an excellent total cost of ownership, and an impressive price per IOP metric. The impressive gains of 12Gb/s performance are definitely yet another step in the correct direction.

The frenetic pace of storage acceleration is absolutely explosive in the last few years, with Nand proving to be extremely disruptive. The companies that can adapt to the new emerging technologies and build the infrastructure to capitalize on these exponentially expanding performance requirements is definitely going to lead the way for continued innovation in this space.

It is very interesting that LSI is saturating the new PCI-E 3.0 specifications bandwidth limits with its very first PCI-E 3.0 compliant controller. The improvements in the firmware stack and the utilization of the new dual core ROC have proven very fruitful for the LSI design team, delivering incredible performance returns. The inclusion of a 50 percent increase in ROC power is also going to be very beneficial in parity raid sets and processing-heavy tasks.

LSI is taking a number of steps to revolutionize the datacenter as we have witnessed over the past few days. Some of the advances in the LSI Accelerated Solutions Division are truly exciting, with Solid State Storage taking a forefront.

Look for a few more articles in short order highlighting some of the advances from the summit!

LSI PRESS RELEASE

LSI to Demonstrate Industrys First 12Gb/s SAS Expander IC for Servers and External Storage Systems

 Technology demonstration to highlight significant performance benefits of 12Gb/s SAS with existing 6Gb/s drive infrastructure

ACCELERATING INNOVATION SUMMIT, MILPITAS, Calif., November 15, 2011 “ LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today announced it is demonstrating the industrys first 12Gb/s SAS expander IC this week at the LSI Accelerating Innovation Summit and Technology Showcase in Milpitas, Calif.

The technology demonstration highlights the performance benefits of a 12Gb/s SAS solution with existing 6Gb/s drives compared to an end-to-end 6Gb/s SAS solution. The demo utilizes the next-generation LSI® 12Gb/s SAS expander and 12Gb/s SAS I/O controller connected to sixteen 6Gb/s SAS hard disk drives (HDDs). 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.

12Gb/s SAS components provide the opportunity to extend existing investments in 6Gb/s drive infrastructure while maximizing storage performance for I/O-intensive applications, cloud datacenters and virtualized server environments, said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager, RAID Storage Division, LSI. With PCI Express 3.0 platforms on the horizon and enterprise adoption of solid state drives on the rise, 12Gb/s SAS will be essential to unleashing the full performance potential of next-generation server platforms.

The 48-port 12Gb/s SAS expander supports SAS data transfer rates of 12, 6 and 3Gb/s and SATA data transfer rates of 6 and 3Gb/s. The expander can connect directly to up to 44 SAS or SATA devices, including HDDs and solid state drives, and provides table routing to support connections of up to 2,048 SAS addresses.

The expander incorporates the latest enhancements in SAS technology as well as innovative LSI IP, including End Device Frame Buffering (EDFB) technology. This unique LSI feature is designed to help facilitate the industry transition to 12Gb/s SAS-enabled systems by allowing users to take advantage of 12Gb/s speeds while utilizing existing 6Gb/s drive and backplane infrastructure. Intelligence in the expander buffers data and then transfers it out to the drives at 6Gb/s speeds in order to match the bandwidth between faster hosts and slower SAS or SATA devices.

According to industry estimates, 12Gb/s SAS market adoption will begin with the release of individual SAS components and devices, and gain momentum as tier-one OEMs begin production-volume shipments of 12Gb/s SAS-enabled servers and external storage systems. Production-volume shipments of 12Gb/s SAS-enabled servers are estimated to occur by early 2013, followed by the availability of external storage systems by mid-to-late 2013.

Since the inception of SAS, LSI has delivered an industry-leading portfolio of products including SAS ROC, controller and expander ICs, host bus adapters, MegaRAID® and 3ware® RAID controllers, 6Gb/s SAS switches, advanced software options and WarpDrive SLP-300 acceleration cards. Based on a 25-year track record of hardware and firmware expertise and extensive validation processes, LSI is the SAS product supplier of choice for OEMs that want to deliver a broad set of storage solutions.

About LSI
LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters and mobile networks. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners. More information is available at www.lsi.com.