MILPITAS, Calif., March 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- LSI Corporation today announced the industry's first sample shipments of 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expander ICs to major OEM customers, further strengthening its leadership position in the SAS market. By providing OEMs with samples of its second generation SAS expander IC products, LSI is laying the groundwork for complete 6Gb/s SAS ecosystems, which the SCSI Trade Association estimates will be available in the second half of 2009.
"Serial Attached SCSI has penetrated both the server and storage markets and volumes of 3Gb/s SAS solutions are still ramping," said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president of LSI Storage Components Group. "While LSI continues to provide and augment our industry leading portfolio of 3Gb/s SAS products to serve this market, we're also looking to the future. With our superior development and validation processes and focus on interoperability testing, we are able to provide OEMs with robust 6Gb/s SAS expanders that reduce risk and lay the early foundation for the SAS-2 infrastructure."
The LSI SAS2x36 is a 36-port 6Gb/s SAS expander with an integrated ARM processor for topology management functions such as discovery and enclosure services. It supports SAS and SATA data transfer rates of 1.5, 3, and 6Gb/s and incorporates enhanced features such as Spread Spectrum Clocking for EMI reduction, T10-based zoning for network storage security applications, and SAS multiplexing to maximize bandwidth performance to legacy storage devices. The LSI SAS2x36 SAS expander provides storage environments with the ability to connect multiple hosts and targets through a switched device for scalability and with fault-tolerant path-redundancy to improve system reliability ideal for today's enterprise data centers.
"Enterprises need storage solutions that deliver new levels of performance, reliability and scalability across increasingly diverse applications ranging from retail transactions, to real-time business analytics, to delivery of content-on-demand," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research at IDC. "Technologies, such as 6 Gb/s SAS, will play an important role in meeting these emerging enterprise storage requirements. Leading storage solutions providers such as LSI that are making 6 Gb/s SAS products available for interoperability and validation testing will help speed the transition to more powerful storage solutions."
6Gb/s SAS will provide up to double the transfer rate of 3Gb/s SAS solutions and offer greater scalability, while also providing new features including expander zoning, spread spectrum clocking and support for the T10 Protection Information Model for greater reliability, Decision Feedback Equalization for longer cables, and multiplexing. SAS-2 will also provide customers with investment protection by providing backward compatibility with 3Gb/s SAS technologies.
Since the inception of SAS, LSI has delivered market leading products across its portfolio of controller ICs, expanders, host bus and MegaRAID(R) adapters, RAID-on-motherboard solutions and storage systems. By offering best-in-class SAS technologies, assured interoperability, and single vendor support, LSI is the silicon-to-systems supplier of choice for OEMs that want to deliver a broad set of storage solutions.
About LSI
LSI Corporation is a leading provider of innovative silicon, systems and software technologies that enable products, which seamlessly bring people, information and digital content together. The company offers a broad portfolio of capabilities and services including custom and standard product ICs, adapters, systems and software that are trusted by the world's best known brands to power leading solutions in the Storage and Networking markets. More information is available at http://www.lsi.com/.
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