Product Brief

Enhance your external storage environment with high scalability and

performance with LSI SAS Expanders

Overview

The 12Gb/s SAS Expanders are LSI’s seventh generation of expanders that incorporate the

latest enhancements in SAS technology. The 48, 40, 36-port option expanders are designed

with an integrated ARM Cortex-R4 processor for topology management functions such as

discovery, enclosure and drive management, and LED management. The expanders support

SAS data transfer rates of 12, 6, 3 Gb/s, and SATA data transfer rates of 6 and 3Gb/s.

The LSI SAS expanders also incorporate the latest enhancements in SAS technology which

includes Spread Spectrum Clocking for EMI reduction and T-10 based zoning for network

to 12Gb/s SAS-enabled systems by allowing users to take advantage of 12Gb/s speeds while

utilizing existing 6Gb/s drives and backplanes. The expander buffers 6Gb/s data and then

transfers it out to the host at 12Gb/s speeds in order to match the bandwidth between faster

hosts and slower SAS or SATA devices. Additional features such as Port Mirroring allow the

customer to access signals that are not easily accessible by mirroring that signal to an external

connection for debug and diagnosis. The SATA affiliation option allows for turning off all

affiliations and allowing multiple hosts to control various SATA drives.

For improving system reliability for today’s data center and storage subsystems, the LSI SAS

expanders are ideal for connecting multiple targets and hosts in a SAS switched environment.

This will support scalability and fault- tolerant path-redundancy.

SAS Leadership

LSI is a storage market leader in SAS, Enterprise RAID, and Application Acceleration, enabling

the entire storage ecosystem. LSI offers the broadest product portfolio in the industry

switches, advanced software options, and application acceleration solutions. LSI solutions

provide the performance, connectivity, scalability, and manageability required for today’s

enterprise storage environments.

These products use the LSI proven SAS core which has completed extensive stress test and

interoperability testing resulting in the industry’s most robust, interoperable solution.

SDK

A full Software Development Kit (SDK) is available to help enable efficient OEM specific

firmware implementations. The SDK includes source code for the SES module with examples

of typical SES device drivers, the SSP Target, the ISTWI Target, the CLI Interface and the Serial

Applications

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SAS/SATA drive enclosures

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External RAID subsystems

Features

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Integrated Enclosure Processor

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12Gb/s SAS Interface

– 48, 40, 36-port SAS/SATA expanders

– Supports 12Gb/s, 6Gb/s, and 3Gb/s SAS, and

6Gb/s and 3Gb/s SATA data transfer rates

– Ports are non-denominational

- initiator and target connect

– Supports narrow and wide port

configurations

– Spread spectrum clocking

– Supports SSP initiator and target, SMP

initiator and target, STP initiator and SATA

protocols

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T-10 zoning – 255 zones

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Port mirroring

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16 GPIO Pins (64)

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1 LED Pins per Phy

– Configurable for link status, drive activity,

fault LED outputs

– Can be used as GPIOs

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SFF-8485 Compliant (2 SGPIO ports)

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External memory interface support

– 8/16 bit FLASH/NVSRAM

LSI SAS3x48

LSI SAS3x48, LSI SAS3x40, LSI SAS3x36