LSI announced the industry's first sample shipments of 12Gb/s SAS RAID-on-Chip (ROC), controller and expander ICs to server and external storage OEMs, underscoring LSI® leadership in the SAS market segment. By providing customers with early samples of 12Gb/s SAS silicon, LSI is delivering a key technology milestone and laying the foundation for the anticipated SCSI Trade Association 12Gb/s SAS Plugfest in mid-2012.  

Technology demonstrations for OEM customers showcase performance of over 1 million IOPS with a single 8-port 12Gb/s SAS ROC running small block sequential reads/writes in a direct connect configuration to eight hard disk drives.

"12Gb/s SAS technology will enable a new performance class of storage tiering that spans the enterprise from high-performance solid state storage to mega datacenter scale-out architectures," said Dave Reinsel, group vice president, Storage and Semiconductors, IDC. "Early silicon availability is a critical first step toward 12Gb/s SAS infrastructure development, paving the way for a smooth technology transition and market adoption by late 2013."

The 12Gb/s SAS generation will provide double the data transfer rate of 6Gb/s SAS solutions, allowing SAS infrastructure to deliver bandwidth that exceeds that of PCI Express® 3.0 with a single host bus adapter. The improved bandwidth, backed by I/O processing capabilities to maximize link utilization, supports increased scaling of traditional hard disk drives as well as improved solid-state drive (SSD) performance. 12Gb/s SAS will also provide customers with investment protection through designed backwards compatibility with 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s SAS infrastructures.

Along with these performance innovations are new connectivity options including new connectors and high-density cabling (Mini SAS HD) that features passive copper, active copper and optical capabilities, as well as enhanced cable management. These advancements, coupled with SAS expanders, which enable connection to a large numbers of devices, allow for new ways of scaling and configuring 12Gb/s SAS topologies. These topologies will extend the capabilities of SAS in direct attached storage environments for the public cloud and on-premise datacenter environments.

In the 12Gb/s generation, SAS expanders provide higher throughput and support higher port counts for both traditional hard disk drives as well as solid state storage. This improves storage consolidation for applications such as virtualization, tiered storage and digital content distribution.

"With more than 25 million SAS components shipped, and performance demonstrations of over one million IOPS from a single 12Gb/s SAS ROC, LSI is clearly a SAS market segment leader," said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president, RAID Storage Division, LSI. "By offering our OEM customers sample shipments of the industry's first 12Gb/s SAS components, LSI is once again demonstrating its ability to keep our customers at the forefront of industry inflection points."

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.