SAS SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs), with their rich SCSI heritage, continue to be the building blocks of choice for enterprise and cloud storage. Enabling next-generation storage solutions, 12Gb/s SAS is a broadly supported industry standard as it delivers twice the throughput compared to todays 6Gb/s SAS solutions, while maintaining established enterprise protocols and attributes. It is also backward compatible with 6Gb/s SAS for investment protection in current SAS infrastructures.
One of the enterprise features of today’s SAS drives is a second interface port that provides additional bandwidth to the drive. With 12Gb/s SAS on each of these ports, the drive can transmit and receive data at a rate of 12Gb/s, resulting in a total available interface bandwidth of 4.8GB/s per drive. With this speed, enterprise and cloud datacenters will be able to reduce latency by harnessing the ultra-high performance of SSDs or by improving the performance of large-scale HDD infrastructures.
We have successfully achieved interoperability between our 12Gb/s SAS drive and 12Gb/s SAS HBAs and expanders from both LSI and PMC-Sierra, said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. Meeting these interoperability milestones is critical when preparing the industry for the adoption of a new interface standard. We will continue to promote broad industry support for 12Gb/s SAS, including our sponsorship and participation in the SCSI Trade Association Technology Showcase on May 9.
Since the inception of SAS, LSI has delivered an industry-leading portfolio of SAS-based products, said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager, RAID Storage Division, LSI Corporation. As the preferred enterprise interface of the future, 12Gb/s SAS will be essential to unleashing the full performance potential of SSD storage solutions to help datacenters and cloud environments contend with massive data growth and accelerate application performance. With our ongoing validation processes and compatibility testing with HGST, we are paving the way for a smooth industry transition and market adoption of 12Gb/s SAS solutions by 2013.
PMCs 12Gb/s SAS protocol controllers, RAID-on-Chip (RoC) controllers and expanders enable breakthrough performance and scalability for next-generation server and networked storage systems, said Derek Dicker, vice president of marketing for PMCs Enterprise Storage Division. We have been working closely with HGST on interoperability testing, and the high-performance benefits of our 12Gb/s SAS solutions, coupled with HGSTs 12Gb/s SAS drives, will enable a new generation of cutting-edge, scalable tiered storage for corporate and cloud datacenters.