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LSI Corporation is beginning to ship what they say is the industry's first 6-Gb/s serial attached SCSI (SAS) expander IC. By providing OEMs with samples of its second-generation SAS expander IC products, LSI is laying the groundwork for complete 6-Gb/s SAS ecosystems that the SCSI Trade Association estimates will become available in the second half of 2009.

The LSI SAS2x36 is a 36-port 6Gb/s SAS expander with an integrated ARM processor for topology management functions such as discovery and enclosure services. It supports SAS and SATA data transfer rates of 1-, 5-, 3-, and 6-Gb/s and incorporates enhanced features such as spread-spectrum clocking for EMI reduction, T10-based zoning for network storage security applications and SAS multiplexing to maximize bandwidth performance with legacy storage devices.

The LSI SAS2x36 SAS expander provides storage environments with the ability to connect multiple hosts and targets through a switched device for scalability and with fault-tolerant, path-redundancy to improve system reliability.

It is expected that 6-Gb/s SAS technology will play an important role in meeting emerging enterprise storage requirements. 6-Gb/s SAS will provide up to double the transfer rate of 3-Gb/s SAS solutions and offer greater scalability, while also providing new features. These include expander zoning, spread-spectrum clocking and support for the T10 Protection Information Model for greater reliability and decision feedback equalization for longer cables.