Adaptec Series 7 Enterprise RAID Controllers with PCIe 3.0 Preview

[mobilenvidia]

Our good friend Paul has just done a write up on the yet to be released Adaptec 7 series of controllers.
How will Adaptec fare against the now Goliath LSI, competition is always good, so lets hope PMC-Sierra gives LSI a good run for it's money to spur each other on.
Should see a few 8+ port cards coming out, where LSI is lacking a little in their line up.

Full article can be found here

 

[Andreas]

Thanks Pieter.

The product page of the controller is here
Info about the RoC chip: http://pmcs.com/products/storage/raid_controllers/pm8015/
Layout

Some interesting numbers (at least for my more streaming and bandwidth oriented perspective - transaction workloads will differ):
PCIv3 x8 seems to saturate at 6,6GB/sec ( 82% eff of 8GB/s max), which is enough for 12 to 13 SSD's per slot. Fully populated with 16 drives, each SATA6G port would be able to sustain ca. 410 MB/s.

450k IOPS of the RoC might or might not be a limitation.

If the workload needs 512B accesses, 24 SSDs provide 220 MB/sec for the whole 24 drive array - kind of underwhelming.

If the workload needs 4K accesses (or 8KB like with DB's), the numbers would be 1,8GB/sec (or 3,6 GB/sec).
3,6 GB/s with random transfers would be a very good speed.

Good thing is, that this announcement might accelerate the 9206-16e release

(SRP) prices are:
7805 (8 port): 610 USD (Kit: 660)
71605E (16 port): 435
71605 (16 port): 725
71685 (16 int, 8 ext): 1120
72405 (24 int): 975

71605E looks interesting to me ....

Andy

 

[Patrick]

I think Adaptec/ PMC Sierra needed this. From what I have heard, the transition really hurt the 6 series.