IT-Director.com: LSI Doubles Storage Controller Performance and Builds Out Its Channel
Author: Peter Williams
LSI is today announcing a new family of RAID controllers under the name MegaRAID. New signalling means a doubling of performance from the current industry max of 3Gb/s to 6Gb/s data transfer speed to/from actual drives (over the same cabling).
This could be game-changing since the controllers are compatible with all major SAS and SATA drive-types and speeds (Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samsung), as well as SSDs and self-encrypting drives (SEDs), and also with motherboard and chassis suppliers. So LSI is looking for wide deployment on the basis that it will yield an immediate throughput boost.
The company has historically not focused on such self-contained devices; so part of its preparation for launching a whole raft of new products—there are more to follow—has been to build out its worldwide partner and reseller programme so that systems integrators (SIs) and value added resellers and distributors (VARs/VADs) will be able to include them as part of their solutions.
The first five models between them offer a choice of 4 or 8 internal or external ports. Tests have demonstrated 2,875 MB/s read and 1,870 MB/s write speeds, achieving 1 million IOPs. While these raw performance figures represent a step-change, they do not alone reveal the potential significance to the storage and data protection markets.
So consider these figures from IDC; it has recorded a huge rise in modular storage shipments that it estimates as now standing at 10,000 PBs (or 10 Exabytes (EBs)); but IDC also predicts shipments will quadruple to 45 EBs (add 15 zeros!) over the next four years. All this extra data needs to be moved around and replicated.
Home