PMC-Sierra, Inc. (PMC-Sierra) said that its PM8011 SRC 8x6G 6 GB/s SAS RAID-on-Chip (RoC) is shipping on new high-performance Smart Array RAID controller cards from Hewlett-Packard Company (HP). The new HP P212, P410, and P411 Smart Array RAID cards attach the full throughput of 6 GB/s SAS and the 5 GB/s PCI Express 2.0 using the company's new RoCstar Contention-Free Architecture to increase performance in equipment like the HP ProLiant DL385 G5p and the HP ProLiant DL580 G5 servers.

The advanced performance and flexibility of the company’s SRC RoC allows the new 6 GB/s SAS RAID platform to more than double the performance of current RAID solutions.

IT professionals will see dramatically improved performance with the new HP Smart Array cards, enabling them to address their immediate storage needs, while future-proofing their data centers for emerging requirements, said Greg Lang, president and chief executive officer, PMC-Sierra. Providing industry-leading performance and being first to market with end-to-end 6Gb/s SAS chipsets solidifies PMC-Sierra’s position as a technology leader and strengthens our relationship with HP.

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), server shipments are anticipated to continue to grow more than 10 million-units-per-year mark by 2011. HP is recognized server market leader by the volume with market share of over 30%.

Customers need improved RAID performance because of data center demands for higher computing power, storage throughput, and support for virtualization, said Mike Gill, vice president of Industry Standard Servers, HP. PMC-Sierra’s advanced RoC architecture integrated into the HP Smart Array RAID stack enables us to offer the industry’s highest performance server and storage solutions.

The data center demands for the higher computing power, networking bandwidth and support for the virtualization applications are driving system requirements for enhanced host bus interface, input-output, and RAID performance. The company’s RoC device is SAS-2 compliant, doubling the storage throughput to 6 GB/s and allowing a new level of system reliability, availability and the scalability. The SRC 8x6G is also PCI Express 2.0 compliant, doubling the host bus interface bandwidth to 5 GB/s while enhancing power management, diagnostics, and virtualization capabilities. The SRC 8x6G, together with the company’s maxSAS expanders and multiplexers, offers a complete server storage chipset solution.

The device’s new RoCstar architecture efficiently interconnects all the device subsystems, abolishing internal bottlenecks and resource contentions that have plagued competing the RoC solutions. By allowing simultaneous access to all the chip resources, RoCstar technology develops overall system performance by increasing the I/O throughput and lowering latency.

The SRC 8x6G integrates in host, drive, and memory interface standards with the RAID hardware acceleration and the advanced processor subsystem. The device integrates many other advanced features, including:

Eight Port controller compatible with 6.0/3.0Gb/s SAS and 3.0/1.5 Gb/s SATA;

Eight Lane PCI Express 2.0 host interface, full duplex 2.5/5.0 Gb/s per lane;

DDR2-800 memory controller;

High performance MIPS-based multi-processor subsystem;

Hardware XOR and Reed-Solomon Engines for RAID five and six acceleration.