PMC – Enterprise 12Gbps SAS Controllers
January 2012, In a recent discussion with Kevin Burbank, director of marketing, Enterprise Storage Division (ESD), and Brad Craig, manager product marketing, ESD of PMC we had the opportunity to get an overview of their new enterprise class storage controllers for the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) marketplace which increased the data rates up to 12Gbps. These include SAS controllers, port expanders and RAID-on-Chip (RoC) products. These new parts join thier industry leading and energy efficient 6Gbps products which have been in place with OEMs such as HP and for existing fiber channel solutions.
With increasing data storage requirements at the enterprise level, the need for higher bandwidth and throughput has also been driving the limits of today’s tiered storage solutions. SSD’s have moved from the SATA, to FC to PCIe and now to SAS as an interface. The SAS platform continues to have a strong footing in the Enterprise Storage space due to the cabling and reliability aspects of the interface. The new interface also brings with it new capabilities for SSD wear leveling routines. The 12Gbps interface allows for the maximum capability of these products to be realized, while using current generation 6Gbps interface drives.
The older generation products supported 8 ports up to 16 or 24 ports at 6Gbps. The new 12Gbps devices support up to 16 port connections. There is a companion expander chip that allows up to 68 devices to connected in one configuration block. These new 12Gbps controllers are using a DRAM buffer on the drive and controller pipelines to enable a burst mode that can be queued for extended 12Gbps operation. A new feature of these controllers is there availability as both and 8 port and 16 port versions with embedded “StorClad” encryption technology (AES method with IEEE 1691 compliance). This built in encrytion allows for “systemic self encrypting drives” using standard SSD components. The figure below shows a typical configuration and application for the controller and port expander chips.
PMC Tachyon 12Gbps SAS Controllers/Expander Configuration
Tailing u pthe product annoucements, was the new 12Gbps SAS RoC product. This is available in both 8 and 16 port versions and currently sports a DDR3-2133MHz DRAM channerl. Where some RAID controllers have issues with a DDR3 inte4rface, these parts, due to their data rates, fo not. The RAID controls also include support of systems with FLASH backup with a battery backed memory. The RAID stack is currently for non-SSD drives.
The device are sampling in Q1 to select OEMs and qll parts will be iin production in 2012.
