Smart storage platform delivers 3x higher performance than competing solutions

25-01-2021 | Microchip Technology | Semiconductors

Microchip has released the Smart Storage PCIe Gen 4 Tri-Mode SmartROC (RAID-on-Chip) 3200 and SmartIOC (I/O Controller) 2200 storage controllers. These devices all provide proven security and manageability features for the most particular server storage applications.

"We continue to offer the most versatile and innovative controller portfolio for an industry that is rapidly migrating to PCIe Gen4-based servers and NVMe SSDs for performance storage while continuing to leverage SAS/SATA HDDs for bulk storage,” said Pete Hazen, vice president of Microchip’s data centre solutions business unit. “Our industry firsts include support for a PCIe Gen 4 interface with DirectPath technology for low-latency NVMe transactions, and 24G SAS with Dynamic Channel Multiplexing (DCM) for more efficient aggregation of lower-speed SAS or SATA hard drives onto 24G SAS infrastructure."

These products support both x8 and x16 PCIe Gen 4 host interfaces and up to 32 lanes of SAS/SATA/NVMe connectivity. Support for up to 8GB of on-board cache triples the RAID performance in comparison to competitive alternatives. At the same time, DCM provides link efficiency of greater than 99% while ensuring full interoperability with current legacy SAS/SATA infrastructure.

The company’s Smart Storage stack management tools simplify integration and improve product flexibility for system integrators. The new Smart Storage products support SFF's Universal Backplane Management, Intel Virtual Pin Port for intelligent backplane management, and DMTF’s standards-based Platform Level Data Model/Redfish Device Enablement specification simplifying the implementation of out-of-band management over Management Component Transport Protoco/Baseboard Management Controller.

The company's Trusted Platform support provides a new level of compute and supply chain security based on a hardware root of trust that is aligned with the Open Compute Security Project. It has expanded on its unique maxCrypto Controller-Based Encryption solution to support SAS, SATA, and now, NVMe media.

The new Smart Storage platform offerings are supported by the company’s common set of deployment tools. These comprise maxView storage manager, ARCCONF management tools, DMTF’s standards-based PLDM/RDE and ChipLink diagnostic tools.

By Natasha Shek