Adaptec Series 7

Adaptec has announced the Series 7 family, a new line of 6Gb/s RAID controllers that extends Adaptec into the PCI Express 3.0 realm.

Adaptec was acquired in 2010 by PMC-Sierra, a semi-conductor developer. Soon after the merger of the two companies, Adaptec launched their 6 Series of RAID controllers and adaptors. The 6 Series of controllers were designed before the resources of PMC-Sierra were brought into play. The Series 7 products are the first generation of controllers from Adaptec that reaps the benefits of their merger with PMC.

The technology that propels this new generation is the PMC PM8015 ROC. This new ROC is the meat of the story, as it is the first native 24-port ROC. The key to this is that there is no expander needed to connect up to 24 devices. This allows for lower price points and less complexity in the design, not to mention that it will provide for much higher densities in deployment.

The 24-port ROC allows for up to 16 SAS ports with the MD2 small form factor and of course 24 ports in the full size card. In order to cram enough connectivity onboard these small cards for the plethora of available ports, Adaptec is transitioning to the HD MiniSAS specification one year early. Most companies are waiting for the 12Gb/s generation to make the transition and Adaptec feels that this will put them a full year ahead of the competition in instituting the switch to HD MiniSAS.

The new PM8015 also delivers specifications that are simply exciting with up to 6600MB/s or 6.44GB/s in throughput and 450,000 IOPS in random access (4k). Pricing hasn't been announced yet, but prices are projected to be competitive with competing solutions. Full availability for all of the product family will be in October.

We expect to have in some silicon for testing well before that, but first let's take a look at the entire line-up and some other unexpected functionality that these controllers bring with them.