The explosive growth of data in cloud and enterprise datacenters is driving the need for a higher performance storage interface to speed the ability of critical applications to access data. 12Gb/s SAS helps to address this challenge by doubling the performance of current 6Gb/s SAS solutions, delivering the performance to unlock the full potential of PCI Express® 3.0-based systems and solid-state storage solutions.

With 12Gb/s SAS, LSI 4th generation SAS architecture provides a roadmap to greater than one million IOPS performance – and meets the future needs of solid-state storage. LSI will offer a full portfolio of 12Gb/s SAS product solutions for worldwide server and external storage customers including SAS RAID-on-Chip (ROC), controller and expander ICs, MegaRAID®  RAID controller cards and host bus adapters (HBA).  LSI 12Gb/s SAS products are designed to help customers maximize storage performance for I/O-intensive applications, cloud datacenters and virtualized server environments. 

Featuring LSI DataBolt™ Bandwidth Optimizer
LSI’s 12Gb/s SAS products unique feature LSI DataBolt™ Bandwidth Optimizer technology provides customers with a time-to-market advantage in achieving 12Gb/s SAS performance benefits while preserving their existing investments in drive infrastructure.

LSI unique 12Gb/s SAS feature Doubles the throughput over current 6Gb/s SAS solutions Enables early TTM with 12Gb/s SAS performance benefits Removes dependency on HDD roadmap Protects customer drive investment

Figure caption: DataBolt™ technology is the smart, simple way to optimize bandwidth while minimizing hardware.

LSI 12Gb/s SAS Product Portfolio includes:

• LSISAS3108: 8-port 12Gb/s SAS/SATA ROC
• LSISAS3008: 8-port 12Gb/s SAS/SATA I/O controller
• LSISAS3x36R: 36, 28, 24-port 12Gb/s SAS/SATA expanders
• LSISAS3x48: 48, 40, 36-port 12Gb/s SAS/SATA expanders
• LSI SAS HBA solutions ranging from eight to sixteen ports
• LSI MegaRAID® SAS solutions ranging from four to twenty-eight ports

New Class of Performance for Storage Tiering
12Gb/s SAS technology enables a new performance class of storage tiering that spans the enterprise from high-performance solid state storage to mega datacenter scale-out architectures. It provides double the data transfer rate of 6Gb/s SAS solutions, allowing SAS infrastructures 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 SSD performance. 12Gb/s SAS will also provide customers with investment protection through designed backwards compatibility with 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s SAS infrastructures.

The 12Gb/s SAS generation also brings additional 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, enable connections to a large numbers of devices, allowing 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.

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 the Nytro portfolioof intelligent flash-based solutions. 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.