LSI Ships Its First Array Powered by 6Gb/s SAS

LSI, which doesn’t get the storage industry notoriety that some of its competitors seem to attract, nonetheless is one of the most significant storage OEMs in the world.

On May 11, the company introduced a new modular entry-level system, Engenio 2600, its first one powered by 6Gb/s SAS. Engenio 2600, aimed at midrange businesses with smaller IT systems, is designed to scale with those businesses as they adapt to ever-escalating data volumes.

LSI knows how to make and maintain these systems. It already has placed about 400,000 Engenios in deployment around the world, running daily a wide range of verticals. The system includes improved performance and scalability (naturally!), multi-protocol host connectivity, flexible drive support, and advanced energy saving and data security features, LSI said.

The company insists that the Engenio 2600 delivers bandwidth up to 4,000 MB/s on sustained reads from disk, a 4X improvement in throughput performance compared to the previous generation product. The system also delivers more than 40,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) random disk reads, more than a 2X improvement compared to the last generation, the company said.

The new array offers multi-protocol host connectivity, which enables users to take advantage of concurrent direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area network (SAN) implementations, if they choose to do so. The 2600 system’s four native 6Gb/s SAS host interfaces can be intermixed with eight 1Gb/s iSCSI or eight 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) host ports per dual controller, so that’s certainly a desirable option.

This multi-purpose dual protocol approach allows storage admins to implement a choice of configurations – from rack-mounted server and storage DAS implementations using SAS, to iSCSI and FC SAN environments for larger consolidation and virtualization projects.

“The industry has already shifted to 6Gb/s SAS on the drive side and is beginning to move toward solid deployment of related 6Gb/s SAS storage infrastructures,” said John Monroe, research vice president, Storage Markets at Gartner.

The LSI Engenio 2600 is immediately available to OEM customers. Go here for more information.