The arrival of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) at 12Gbps will be a boon for demanding applications such as databases, according to Adaptec by PMC, which is demonstrating the technology at Cebit.
To show the potential of the upcoming technology, Adaptec is using a PCIe card powered by a raid-on-a-chip controller from parent company PMC-Sierra and 200GB prototype solid-state drives from Seagate Technology, according to senior product manager JA1/4rgen Frick. Performance is measured using Iometer on 256-kilobyte sequential reads, he said.
"We are showing a sequential read performance of roughly 760 megabytes per second. That is obviously faster than what you would get with the 6Gbps interface, which enables you to do 550 megabytes per second," Frick said.
He expects speeds will improve; the first-generation products won't fully take advantage of the bandwidth the new 12Gbps interface offers, but over time future products will.
The first products supporting the 12Gbps interface will arrive toward the end of the year, according to Frick.
Once servers have been upgraded, there are a number of different applications that will be able to take advantage of the increased speeds. They include databases that handle large amounts of transactions and professional video installations that want to stream 4K content, Frick said.
This isn't the first time SAS at 12Gbps has been demonstrated and tested. Last year, the SCSI Trade Association organized a plugfest that gathered vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NetApp and Western Digital to test the capabilities of the technology.
The underlying standard has already been approved.
