LSI Expands SAS and SATA Storage Adapter Offering by 50 Percent

MILPITAS, Calif., Sept. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- LSI Logic Corporation today introduced six new SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA (Serial ATA) adapters to its family of storage controller cards. With these new products, the portfolio of LSI SAS and SATA adapters now addresses the full spectrum of server, workstation and enterprise storage interconnection requirements.

"With this major expansion of its storage adapter line, LSI now offers complete SAS and SATA coverage for both direct attached or networked storage configurations," said Brian Babineau, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Technology transitions such as PCI Express and Serial Attached SCSI create inflection points where LSI has the ability to differentiate from the competition, and the company has once again done so with its new storage adapters."

Building on the company's HBA product line, LSI released three SAS adapters, including a new line of low-cost SAS PCI Express HBAs. Each features integrated RAID (IR), which supports RAID levels 0, 1, 1E and 10E (enhanced mirroring) for increased system reliability. When combined with the high- reliability attributes of SAS, the new HBAs offer higher performance and higher availability for storage environments where a full RAID implementation is not required or is cost prohibitive. Each of these new products offer 3 Gb/s SAS/SATA connectivity.

For the MegaRAID product lines, LSI unveiled two new SATA RAID adapters and a SAS zero-channel RAID (ZCR) adapter. The SATA adapters provide transfer rates up to 3 Gb/s per port in a low-profile adapter, addressing the growing demand for RAID in high-density rack mount chassis environments. The SAS adapter supports SAS connectivity to SAS and SATA drives, enabling large, tiered SAS/SATA storage arrays to provide the data protection and performance advantages of RAID 5. The new SAS card has also received broad support from more than a half-dozen leading motherboard manufacturers, combining LSI SAS technology on the motherboard with LSI market-leading RAID technology.

The new HBAs and MegaRAID adapters complement the existing LSI portfolio which now offers 18 unique SAS and SATA products, making the family the most comprehensive set of SAS/SATA connector configurations and RAID feature offerings available today. The new adapters featuring PCI-Express remove PCI host bus bottlenecks by providing a high-speed 2.5 Gb/s connection.

"With the addition of these new SAS and SATA controllers, LSI is addressing customers' connectivity requirements for direct attached storage and small networked storage," said Luca Bert, director of DAS RAID product management, Engenio Storage Group, LSI Logic. "LSI is the only company with a complete portfolio of storage adapters in SAS and SATA."

The new storage adapters are as follows: Adapter Model Bus Type Server Ports Key Features HBA SAS3041E-R PCI Express 4-internal IR 0, 1,1E and 10E HBA SAS3442E-R PCI Express 4-internal, IR 0, 1,1E 4-external and 10E HBA SAS3080X-R PCI-X 8-internal IR 0, 1,1E and 10E MegaRAID SATA 300-4XLP PCI-X 4-internal RAID 0,1,10,5,50 MegaRAID SATA 300-8ELP PCI Express 8-internal RAID 0,1,10,5,50 MegaRAID SAS 8300XLP PCI-X 8-internal ZCR, R 0,1,10, 5,50

LSI Logic storage component products are supplied to the channel in North America through distribution partners such as Arrow Electronics, ASI, Bell Microproducts, Insight Electronics, Ingram-Micro, Microland and Tech Data. Resellers interested in LSI as a partner, should visit: http://lsi.com/reseller .

About LSI Logic

LSI Logic Corporation is a leading provider of silicon-to- systems solutions that are used at the core of products that create, store and consume digital information. LSI offers a broad portfolio of capabilities including custom and standard product ICs, host bus and RAID adapters, storage area network solutions and software applications. LSI products enable leading technology companies in the Storage and Consumer markets to deliver some of the most advanced and well-known electronic systems in the market today. More information is available at http://www.lsi.com/ .

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ADDITIONAL QUOTES

"Bell Micro and LSI are worldwide leaders in storage technology. In storage adapters, LSI leads the market for a clear reason -- they offer more solutions including SCSI, SATA, SAS and Fibre Channel than any other company in the world," stated Joe Cousins, vice president, Bell Micro. "Bell Micro is known as the leading expert in storage product distribution and LSI has been the perfect complement to our growth. Providing LSI storage adapters to our broad base of channel customers has made LSI one of our fastest growing product lines over the past several years."

"A year ago AIC and LSI Logic announced a number of products, which have shown the marketplace that SAS solutions are superior for the SATA/SAS market," said Gene Lee, corporate vice president, AIC. "Today's announcement, clearly illustrates that SAS/SATA solutions have become the de facto industry standard and the benefits of SAS/SATA are being realized by customers across all industries."