PMC advances 12G SAS at IDF2013
September 2013, At IDF in San Francisco, PMC was discussing their Series 8 RAID controller for the 12G SAS interface. This is the continuation of the Adaptec product line targeted at the enterprise marketplace. For the definitions of PMC, enterprise storage includes Hadoop in addition to traditional multi-tiered (hot-warm-cold-archive) architectures. These storage networks are changing as they move from distributed racks to more rack level solutions, still featuring the high density storage, but at a higher density and capacity of external storage per server. This is increased the use of the 12G interface solutionon a shorter distance basis to provide the increased density and capacity. As these local storage devices get larger in size, so must the data rate at which the content is stored and received.
The new Series 8 12G SAS RAID controllers from PMC supports an option for a SuperCap that controls a storage buffer FLASH to preserve the content of the controller during a system fault. This is key for systems like Hadoop, where the redundancy of the data storage is supposed to provide the primary data integrity and error correction for the system. The SuperCap subsystem is a available as a built in design element on some of the boards, and as an add on “daughter board” for others. In both cases the SuperCap itself and the connector is a single SKU element that works on all the products, so there is a single stocking component.
Also available in these boards is the MaxCache Plus system. This is a read & write caching system that directly supports tiering from the board. The per drive volume based policy engine utilizes user defined policies to determine at the controller level the disposition of the data to reside in cold, warm, hot and other data tiers. At this time, the data tiers are determined by the temporal state of the data and is independent of the drive type (SSD, various speeds of HDD) which have their definitions setup in a configuration file. The physical drives may include self-encrypting drives that are TCG & Opal compliant.
PMC Adaptec 16 port Series 8 12Gbps SAS RAID controllers
To provide performance for the 12G interface, the 5 new controller boards have a PCI Gen 3 interface and are sampling now with production in Q1 ’14. All the Series 8 designs feature a low profile form factor and area full 16 port adapter. (typically 8 internal and 8 external). The software management allows high density and control of hybrid arrays on a single controller so the mix of SSDs and HDDs can be set as required for the enterprise application, rather than being dictated by the controller board. The 12Gbps SAS interface on the Series 8 boards delivers >700,000 4K random read RAID I/O s per second, which is the fastest in the industry, 60% faster than previous controllers and 1,000 times faster than a traditional HDD.
