LSI Launches 6Gb SAS HBAs

LSI Corporation announced availability of a new family of high-performance SATA+SAS host bus adapters (HBAs) based on 6Gb/s SAS technology. The LSI SAS 9200 series HBAs, based on the LSISAS2008 6Gb/s SAS controller IC, offer new levels of performance and scalability for internal and external direct-attached storage deployments using SATA and SAS disk drives.

          
LSI SAS 9211-8i

The LSI SAS 9200 series adapters provide both high bandwidth and high I/O transaction processing and the flexibility to connect to 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s SATA and SAS hard drives or solid-state drives. The adapters are designed to support applications ranging from email, OLTP and streaming video to data center workloads such as Web hosting and cloud computing.

"LSI is committed to providing our channel partners with a broad portfolio of best-in-class storage solutions," said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, Engenio Storage Group, LSI. "By being first to market with a complete lineup of high-performance 6Gb/s host bus adapters and RAID controllers, we’re enabling channel partners to build systems for a wide variety of applications."

The new family of HBAs include the LSI SAS 9211-4i, LSI SAS 9211-8i and the LSI SAS 9200-8e. The adapters more than double the performance of the previous generation SATA+SAS HBAs, delivering throughput rates of up to 2.6GB/s in sequential reads, 3.0GB/s in sequential writes and up to 317,000 IOPs (input/output operations per second) performance.

The SAS 9200 series adapters also support nearly twice the number of SATA and SAS devices as the previous-generation products. The SAS 9211-4i (4-port) and SAS 9211-8i (8-port) models provide internal storage connections with support for up to 256 SATA and SAS physical devices. The SAS 9200-8e (8-port) is designed for external storage connections and supports up to 512 SATA and SAS devices. Utilizing external RAID and JBOD enclosures, the adapter enables growing businesses to address storage capacity requirements of up to one petabyte.

"Whether a customer needs to connect a single hard drive to a workstation or a high-availability external storage system to an enterprise-class server, the new LSI family of HBAs offer cost-effective solutions for transferring data with greater speed, availability and reliability," said William Huang, President, Area Data Systems. "The combination of our high-density storage server system and the new LSI SAS 9200 series HBAs will provide system builders and VARs with a flexible, customizable solution for addressing specific application environments."

Data availability is also enhanced with the addition of RAID 10 support. Using LSI Integrated RAID, a low-cost, hardware RAID solution within MegaRAID Storage Manager, channel partners can configure highly reliable storage system environments with optional RAID 0, 1, 1E and RAID 10 data protection levels.

Pricing and availability

Internal ports:

• LSI SAS 9211-4i (4-port): $205
• LSI SAS 9211-8i (8-port): $285

External ports:

• LSI SAS 9200-8e (8-port): $419

The SAS 9200 series HBAs extend the industry’s broadest portfolio of 6Gb/s SAS-based products, which includes the recently introduced MegaRAID 9200 series RAID controller cards.

LSI offers an extensive portfolio of SATA and SAS solutions, including MegaRAID and 3ware controller cards, host bus adapters, SAS-to-SATA bridge cards and controllers, expanders and RAID-on-Chip ICs. LSI storage products are available through a worldwide network of distributors, integrators and VARs. The LSI SAS 9200 series HBAs are immediately available.