News | March 9, 2012

PMC Supplies RAID-On-Chip Controllers For HP ProLiant Gen8 Servers And Smart Array Adapters

PMC-Sierra, Inc. or PMC, the semiconductor innovator transforming storage, optical and mobile networks, recently announced that its 6Gb/s SAS RAID-on-Chip (RoC) controllers are shipping on new HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers. PMC's SRCv RoCs are the world's first production released PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 capable storage controllers for the volume server market. The latest PCIe technology and 24 ports of 6Gb/s SAS connectivity enable Gen8 Servers to deliver seven times faster solid state storage performance and support twice the number of drives per RAID. The SRCv family is shipping as part of the HP Smart Array P420, P421 and P422 RAID Adapters, and across the HP ProLiant DL360p, DL380p and BL460c Gen8 servers.

"By enabling more than double the throughput of competing devices, the SRCv product family provides the high-bandwidth RAID I/O needed for today's most demanding enterprise and scale-out server customers," said Derek Dicker, vice president of marketing, Enterprise Storage Division, PMC. "Continuing our history of being first to market with production solutions, PMC has again shown our technology leadership in storage controllers."

The SRCv controllers set a new record for RAID controllers by driving over 6GB/s throughput through a single controller, enabling customers to directly attach eight of the highest performing 6Gb/s SAS solid state drives (SSDs) and fully realize their performance potential. PMC's second-generation RoCStar architecture continues to deliver industry-leading performance by efficiently interconnecting all device subsystems, eliminating internal bottlenecks and resource contentions that limit competing shared-bus solutions. IT professionals will see a marked performance increase in time-critical functions such as RAID rebuilds and data backup.

"IT professionals continue to see increased storage demand on their server infrastructure and are looking to improve workload performance in next generation purchases by leveraging solid state technology," said McLeod Glass, director of product marketing, Industry Standard Server and Software, HP. "The HP ProLiant Gen8 platform combines PMC's industry-leading SRCv RoC family and HP Smart Array technology with solid state drives to improve data-intensive storage performance by seven times."

The PM8020 SRCv 8x6G and PM8015 SRCv 24x6G, integrate the latest in host, drive and memory interface standards with RAID hardware acceleration and an advanced multi-core processor subsystem. The devices integrate numerous other advanced features, including:

  • 8- and 24-port SAS 2.1 controller compatible with 6.0/3.0/1.5 Gb/s SAS/SATA;
  • 8-lane PCIe 3.0 host interface - full duplex 2.5/5.0/8.0 Gb/s per lane;
  • RoCstar contention-free architecture;
  • DDR3-1600 memory controller;
  • High performance MIPS-based™ multi-processor subsystem;
  • Block DMA engine; and
  • Hardware XOR and Reed-Solomon engines for RAID 5 and 6 acceleration.

About PMC
PMC is the semiconductor innovator transforming networks that connect, move and store digital content. Building on a track record of technology leadership, the company is driving innovation across storage, optical and mobile networks. PMC's highly integrated solutions increase performance and enable next-generation services to accelerate the network transformation. For more information, visit www.pmcs.com.

SOURCE: PMC-Sierra, Inc.