BANGALORE, INDIA: LSI Corporation announced significant extensions to its SAS portfolio with the introduction of the industry's first 6Gb/s SAS-to-SATA bridge cards and 16-port SAS storage processor.

The new 6Gb/s SAS components for external storage applications extend the industry's broadest portfolio of SAS solutions. Major OEMs are sampling the new 6Gb/s SAS products to gain a time-to-market advantage for the deployment of next-generation SAS infrastructure solutions. 

The new 6Gb/s LSISS9252 and LSISS9253 SAS-to-SATA bridge cards allow SAS capabilities to be seamlessly added to existing SATA disk drives. The cards enhance SATA drives with essential enterprise-class features, providing OEMs with a complete turnkey solution for interconnecting low-cost, high capacity SATA drives into enterprise storage solutions – without sacrificing reliability, manageability or data availability.

Steve Fingerhut, senior director of marketing, Storage Components Group, LSI, said: "The cost and capacity benefits of SATA drives are well known, but deployment in enterprise storage environments has been limited due to scaling and reliability concerns. With today's announcement, LSI is supplying OEMs with a first-to-market solution for increasing storage system capacity at a lower cost, using OEM customers' robust, scalable SAS infrastructure."

The new SAS-to-SATA bridge cards, which are for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, respectively, consist of fifth-generation LSI AAMUX  (Active-Active Multiplexer) technology, a dual-ported SAS host interface and SATA device interface.

The LSI bridge technology is designed to enable single-ported SATA drives to connect seamlessly like native dual-ported SAS drives for use in enterprise storage systems using SAS expanders. The cards are completely designed, manufactured and warranted by LSI, providing OEMs with a reduced total cost of ownership and time-to-market advantage.

The cards support full SAS SSP protocol to the host, thereby removing SATA commands and signaling from the SAS domain. This helps to eliminate SATA affiliation issues associated with the multi-initiator configurations that are critical to enterprise deployments. In addition, two unique SAS addresses per host port help to eliminate any failover issues with the SATA drives.

The cards support auto-speed negotiation (6, 3 and 1.5Gb/s SAS/SATA I/O) and Native Command Queuing, and are backward compatible with first-generation SATA I/O and 3Gb/s SAS. The cards support SATA disk drives independent of speed and capacity, and are universally compatible with third-party SAS controllers and expanders.

Brendan Collins, vice president, Product Line Management, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, said: "Hitachi has been active in the development of 6Gb/s SAS, so we are pleased to collaborate with LSI to promote the new interface standard. SAS-to-SATA bridge cards will make it easier to design a single, configurable storage solution that meets a broad range of price, performance and scalability requirements."

"The configuration flexibility will result in storage systems that include a combination of SAS drives optimised for performance, and SATA drives that deliver high capacity and a low-cost-per-gigabyte for nearline storage and other lower duty cycle applications."

LSI is demonstrating a 6Gb/s SAS-to-SATA bridge solution this week at Storage Networking World in Dallas, Texas.