LSI Accelerating Innovation Summit 2011

Computurd

Gawd
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Dec 19, 2008
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hey guys, going out to silicon valley for a conference called LSI’s Accelerating Innovation Summit 2011. Big things happening with LSI/SandForce, so that is sure to be a huge topic, among many others of course.

I will have some Q&A sessions directly with senior management of both companies, so if anyone has any questions, and I mean anything, that they would like to know please post. There will be free access to engineers, marketing, and senior executives so any type of question from buisness down to firmware, this would be the place to put it.

The event starts Tuesday, and a BIG thanks to the ssd review for putting me in a position to attend this invite-only conference!

We will also be going to a hockey game (rink side seats) with several execs from SandForce so should be great fun :)

....and you better believe that i am somehow gonna get my hands on some 12gb/s benchmarks, there will be product demos, and im sure their new board that is doing 1 million iops will be there. They will need uber security to keep me away:D

http://www.lsi.com/AIS2011/Pages/default.aspx

AIS2011.png
 
When will LSI release a *retail* 16 external SAS lane half-height HBA? ;)

That's a lot of ports to cram onto a half-height HBA! Of course, mini-SAS HD is making this possible, finally!

Computurd, keep in mind the moderator of this very subforum is an engineer at LSI's RAID Storage Division ;) I tend to let our marketing guys do the talking since I'm never sure what it's safe to say or not...
 
How many watt does the New 12 gbit chipset typically use? (im not interrsted in 40 watt card...)
 
hey UICompE02, i had no idea :) Nice to meet ya! I have had some great interactions with the guys here in wichita, so i always have had a great experience with LSI reps/engineers :)

Gonna be great fun! are you based in miltpas?
 
Please ask them to make hdd spin-down available on the LSI 2008 controllers (9211-8i). :D

I did not know it when I bought my Tyan motherboard with bulit-in 2008 controller. I'm trying to make my system use as little energy as possible, and I didn't check if it supported spin-down... My mistake... :rolleyes:
 
hey UICompE02, i had no idea :) Nice to meet ya! I have had some great interactions with the guys here in wichita, so i always have had a great experience with LSI reps/engineers :)

Gonna be great fun! are you based in miltpas?

I'm in the Colorado Springs office.

I always wish I could answer more questions about our controllers in this forum, but even though I know the chips inside and out, I know very little about the publicly-available utilities that LSI distributes.
 
great stuff fellas, waiting on the plane now :) There is this and a few other questions that will be sure to be asked :)
 
How many watt does the New 12 gbit chipset typically use? (im not interrsted in 40 watt card...)
Again, Im not interested in a 40-50 Watt card.

The current 6Gbps card use 20Watt. How much does the 12 Gbps card use? What ballpark? So I can plan for my next fileserver...
 
well im here :) LOL

anyways, they have announced 12gb/s IC as the kick off to the event. More to come on that.
 
well im here :) LOL

anyways, they have announced 12gb/s IC as the kick off to the event. More to come on that.

Thanks for keeping us up to date. There have been rumors of LSI's 12Gbps chip for months now but I've yet to see any benchmarks. As far as I know, this is the first official word from LSI on these chips. 12Gbps is going to be critical for adding a large number of drives onto a SAS expander which uses a single sas cable to connect the sas expander to the raid card.
This will raise the current limit of 24Gbps throughput of a normal 4 lane SAS cable up 48Gbps. That is 6GBps for those who can't divide by 8. Assuming a SSD is running along at 500MBps, than you can put up to 12 SSDs on a single SAS expander before the trunk line between the SAS expander and the raid card starts to become the bottleneck. This is assuming a worst case scenario of sequential read/write. Of coarse running more than one line between the SAS expander and the raid card increases this by a lot.

Overall it is very impressive and if SSDs prices ever take a noise drive, this will actually be useful for some of us.
 
ACCELERATING INNOVATION SUMMIT, MILPITAS, Calif., November 15, 2011 –LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today announced it is demonstrating the industry’s first 12Gb/s SAS expander IC this week at the LSI Accelerating Innovation Summit and Technology Showcase in Milpitas, Calif.

The technology demonstration highlights the performance benefits of a 12Gb/s SAS solution with existing 6Gb/s drives compared to an end-to-end 6Gb/s SAS solution. The demo utilizes the next-generation LSI® 12Gb/s SAS expander and 12Gb/s SAS I/O controller connected to sixteen 6Gb/s SAS hard disk drives (HDDs). The 12Gb/s SAS solution with 6Gb/s SAS drives in a PCI Express® 2.0 system achieved a 65 percent increase in throughput and a 58 percent increase in IOPS (I/O operations per second) performance compared to the end-to-end 6Gb/s SAS storage solution.

“12Gb/s SAS components provide the opportunity to extend existing investments in 6Gb/s drive infrastructure while maximizing storage performance for I/O-intensive applications, cloud datacenters and virtualized server environments,” said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager, RAID Storage Division, LSI. “With PCI Express 3.0 platforms on the horizon and enterprise adoption of solid state drives on the rise, 12Gb/s SAS will be essential to unleashing the full performance potential of next-generation server platforms.”

The 48-port 12Gb/s SAS expander supports SAS data transfer rates of 12, 6 and 3Gb/s and SATA data transfer rates of 6 and 3Gb/s. The expander can connect directly to up to 44 SAS or SATA devices, including HDDs and solid state drives, and provides table routing to support connections of up to 2,048 SAS addresses.

The expander incorporates the latest enhancements in SAS technology as well as innovative LSI IP, including End Device Frame Buffering (EDFB) technology. This unique LSI feature is designed to help facilitate the industry transition to 12Gb/s SAS-enabled systems by allowing users to take advantage of 12Gb/s speeds while utilizing existing 6Gb/s drive and backplane infrastructure. Intelligence in the expander buffers data and then transfers it out to the drives at 6Gb/s speeds in order to match the bandwidth between faster hosts and slower SAS or SATA devices.

According to industry estimates, 12Gb/s SAS market adoption will begin with the release of individual SAS components and devices, and gain momentum as tier-one OEMs begin production-volume shipments of 12Gb/s SAS-enabled servers and external storage systems. Production-volume shipments of 12Gb/s SAS-enabled servers are estimated to occur by early 2013, followed by the availability of external storage systems by mid-to-late 2013.

Since the inception of SAS, LSI has delivered an industry-leading portfolio of products including SAS ROC, controller and expander ICs, host bus adapters, MegaRAID® and 3ware® RAID controllers, 6Gb/s SAS switches, advanced software options and WarpDrive™ SLP-300 acceleration cards. Based on a 25-year track record of hardware and firmware expertise and extensive validation processes, LSI is the SAS product supplier of choice for OEMs that want to deliver a broad set of storage solutions.

here is the release
 
the controller will only consume a few more watts btw. 2-3 more watts is all for the 12gb/s controller.

port aggregation is the main buzz..you can use 2 6Gb/s devices on one 12Gb/s port. for some reason i cannot link the articles...
 
yes, with all of them. and there is a -4i version of the 9265 coming in a few months. sorry forgot to answer that one :) as to spin down there was no one who could answer that question definitively as to whether there are plans for support.
 
there is a -4i version of the 9265 coming in a few months. sorry forgot to answer that one :) as to spin down there was no one who could answer that question definitively as to whether there are plans for support.

Thanks for asking this! I've been wondering why they hadn't released a 9265-4i card.
If they price it right around the same or just above the 9260-4i than that is going to going to be very temping. Do I buy the 9265-4i and try to import the foreign raid config off of my drives into the new controller before selling my 9260-4i? I'd hate to risk my data but since I'm planning on buying CacheCade, I would rather the money goes on a 9265 rather than a 9260 since the 9265-4i must scale much better with multiple SSDs than the 9260 does.
 
Thanks for asking this! I've been wondering why they hadn't released a 9265-4i card.
If they price it right around the same or just above the 9260-4i than that is going to going to be very temping. Do I buy the 9265-4i and try to import the foreign raid config off of my drives into the new controller before selling my 9260-4i? I'd hate to risk my data but since I'm planning on buying CacheCade, I would rather the money goes on a 9265 rather than a 9260 since the 9265-4i must scale much better with multiple SSDs than the 9260 does.

first I purchased the 9265-8i, imported the array by just plugging in the same drives, and then sold you the 9260-4i card. I would do the same thing if you're looking for an upgrade.

however, what are you looking to do with cachecade? you have to keep in mind that as of right now, only the 9260 series has cachecade 2.0 support, the 9265 now is using the original cachecade that can't do write caching, they still have to port cachecade 2.0 in.
 
first I purchased the 9265-8i, imported the array by just plugging in the same drives, and then sold you the 9260-4i card. I would do the same thing if you're looking for an upgrade.

however, what are you looking to do with cachecade? you have to keep in mind that as of right now, only the 9260 series has cachecade 2.0 support, the 9265 now is using the original cachecade that can't do write caching, they still have to port cachecade 2.0 in.

This plan is a couple of months away. Not only do I have to wait for the 9265-4i to come out but around that time Cachecade2.0 support for the 9265 will be out, be able to do raid5 for the caching SSDs, and be able to remember the read and write cache after a reboot. Early spring, late winter is my guess.

As for what I'm I'm trying to do with it...... I'm just trying to make my raid array even more overkill. I like to run multiple VMs (24GB of ram) so having several VMs running, and hundreds of torrents seeding can put enough of a load on the array that it slows down large file transfers. Do I need the speed? No. Do I want it? Yes! I can't really buy more HDDs with the prices right now but I've been seeing some SSDs for under $1/GB. Besides, my array's sequential transfer speed is already higher than my SSD but where it is really lacking is in random small file transfers.

Thanks for selling me the 9260 BTW. It is a great card.
 
Any word on the 9265-4i card? I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere other than this thread? Would be a great replacement for the 9260-4i. :p
 
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