“With our new Series 8 RAID adapters, PMC is now addressing all the key points of 12Gb/s SAS connectivity,” said Jared Peters, vice president of Server Storage Solutions at PMC. “We designed our Series 8 adapter family to enable denser, faster and more configurable storage environments, which translates directly into faster data delivery and access. With innovations like the maxCache Plus™ tiering capability for Series 8, we continue to provide the technology that helps datacenter architects get the most value and performance out of their storage assets.”
Adaptec Series 8 delivers an industry-leading >700,000 4k random read RAID I/Os per second, a 60 percent improvement over the previous generation. This level of performance unleashes the full potential of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, which are twice as fast as 6Gb/s SAS SSDs and up to 1,000 times faster than traditional hard drives.
The Series 8 family has five models, all based on PMC’s 12Gb/s SAS RoC controllers, in low-profile form factor. Configurations include 16-port adapters that connect twice as many drives as competing solutions. This unique high-port technology also provides the flexibility to create hybrid storage arrays utilizing any combination of SSDs and HDDs. Deploying hybrid arrays with Series 8 and maxCache Plus caching and tiering software enables SSDs to accelerate cloud computing applications.
Adaptec’s fourth generation caching solution now includes tiering technology that allows customers to maximize their storage investments. The new maxCache Plus with Series 8 provides the flexibility to configure all storage devices in a server environment, not just those connected to PMC hardware. All storage assets in a server can be leveraged according to their performance capabilities with the fastest media used for data acceleration, enabling the most cost-effective storage architecture.
“Enterprise datacenters and cloud environments have a need to accelerate application performance while coping with massive data growth cost effectively,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research director for Solid State Storage at IDC. “12Gb/s SAS architectures and tiering technologies are poised to overcome these challenges and help unlock the full potential of SSDs, which is one of the key reasons IDC expects shipments of SAS SSDs to grow at a 75 percent compound annual growth rate from 2012 to 2017.”
12Gb/s SAS is an established interface for future generations of high-performance enterprise servers and storage arrays, and it is essential to realizing the full performance potential of SSDs. The standard is also backward compatible with existing 6Gb/s SAS infrastructures.
“Our new 12Gb/s SAS SSDs dramatically improve response times to dynamic and mission critical data in cloud and datacenter environments, but an end-to-end 12Gb/s SAS architecture is a critical part of the foundation of the build out,” said Gary Gentry, senior vice president and general manager of Seagate’s solid state drive business. “Products like PMC’s Series 8 adapters are key elements that will allow data center architects to realize the full benefits of our industry-leading SSD performance.”