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s servers are pushed to meet advancing system and computing requirements, reducing total cost of storage ownership becomes increasingly critical. Applications such as streaming multimedia, e-commerce, email, and medical imaging are causing IT managers to look for more efficient ways to use storage. The result has been a new evolution of storage interface technologies, and India’s design centers are playing a critical role in the development.
Companies such as LSI are growing engineering capabilities in India focused on serial attached SCSI (SAS) controller design. As the latest generation of the SCSI interface, SAS is now meeting the demands of today’s businesses through improved performance, flexibility, and deployment topologies, while still maintaining the legacy SCSI cost structure.
STORAGE INTERFACE TECHNOLOGIES
LSI has been a leader in the development of storage interface technologies and was first to market with SAS components. LSI HBAs (host bus adapters) and MegaRAID adapters span the direct attached storage ecosystem; from the low-end SATA (serial ATA) to the high-end SAS. All products share the same proven software stack, management utilities and upgrade path.
“LSI has a commanding SAS market share and is utilizing India resources to extend its leadership in the development of second-generation products. We are working on SAS controller designs that offer 6 gigabits per second throughput per port, with 5 gigabits per second PCI Express host interfaces,” said Rajiv Kapur, Managing Director, LSI Logic India. “One of our Bangalore design centers is focused entirely on storage applications and is engineering complete products.”
With its serial interface, SAS provides better signal integrity and greater device addressability. Using an expander, one or more SAS host controllers can connect to a large number of drives. Each expander allows connectivity to 128 physical links, which may include other host connections, SAS expanders, or hard disks. This highly scalable connection scheme enables enterprise-level topologies that easily support multi-node clustering for automatic fail-over capability or load balancing. Numerous other features of SAS such as the full duplex architecture effectively doubles the throughput.
Additional benefits include simplified cabling, improved space, heat management, and power consumption in the data center.
CUSTOMIZATION
Perhaps the most significant advantage, SAS provides unprecedented customization opportunities for system integrators by supporting three main protocols. By adding support for SATA tunneling protocol, SAS controllers are able to communicate with both SAS and SATA drive devices. The subsystem uses SATA Tunneling Protocol for SATA devices and serial SCSI Protocol for SAS drive devices.
In addition, drives can be hot swapped and may be physically inserted on the same back plane connector. This flexibility allows IT managers to use SAS to achieve the enterprise-class storage and network performance required by mission-critical data, while protecting their investments in SCSI software and middleware. Greater storage efficiency continues to be an urgent priority for every enterprise, and SAS is uniquely positioned to facilitate this key goal. Clearly, India is playing a significant role in establishing this new paradigm for efficient enterprise storage.
Author information
You can reach Ganesan Viswanathan at ganesan.viswanathan@lsi.com
blurb; Greater storage efficiency continues to be an urgent priority for every enterprise.
