Broadcom Break through Storage Bottlenecks
Server storage performance slowed by traditional bottleneck
Enterprise server storage is pressed to support massive data growth as applications ranging from information-hungry big data analytics and virtualization to workstation computing drive ever higher performance and capacity requirements. Growing global demand for more storage capacity and speed comes into no sharper focus than in enterprises migrating to scale-out infrastructures that, according to research firm IDC, will mushroom from 20 exabytes (EB) of external and 8EB of internal storage in 2012 to 102EB and 36EB, respectively, in 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 37.6%*.
Storage media transfer rates continue to increase to help move data faster, with today’s consumer-class hard drives now regularly surpassing 150MB/s and solid state drives topping 500MB/s. The perennial constraint to storage performance, however, remains the bottleneck between the host system and storage media. The challenge for IT managers is to open the choke point by increasing the speed of the storage interface while providing a cost-effective path to easy scaling in the future.
Opening the server storage bottleneck
12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology enables a new performance, class of storage tiering that spans servers with solid state drives to hyperscale datacenter scale-out architectures. The interface doubles the data transfer rate of 6Gb/s SAS solutions, allowing SAS infrastructures to deliver bandwidth that exceeds that of PCI Express® 3.0 with a single host bus adapter (HBA).
12Gb/s SAS enterprise-proven solutions provide the connectivity, scalability, performance and manageability required for the most demanding enterprise storage applications. The products are designed to help customers maximize storage performance for I/O-intensive applications, web cloud datacenters and virtualized servers.
To increase the performance of existing SAS devices, this technology can aggregate bandwidth from 6Gb/s and 3Gb/s hard disk drives and solid state drives to a 12Gb/s data stream by intelligently buffering data. DataBolt technology uses proven SAS and SATA bridge technology and is fully compatible with the 12Gb/s SAS T10 specification.
Benefits of 12Gb/s SAS include:
- Performance rivaling 8 and 16Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC), but without the considerably higher FC infrastructure costs
- A long performance roadmap, with future generations already defined
- Backward compatibility with current SAS and SATA infrastructure to enable a smooth technology transition
- Doubling of 6Gb/s SAS performance to unlock the full potential of PCI Express 3.0 based systems and solid state storage solutions
- DataBolt technology to allow users to take advantage of 12Gb/s speeds while using existing SAS drive infrastructure