Entry-level RAID adapter delivers 40% power savings

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

Microchip Technology Inc. has expanded its Adaptec SmartRAID portfolio with the SmartRAID 3100E RAID adapters that offer the performance of hardware RAID at an entry-level price for cost-sensitive cloud, enterprise, and workstation applications. The new entry-level adapter provides over 60% performance acceleration over Microchip’s prior-generation Adaptec Series 8E products at 40% power savings.

The Adaptec SmartRAID 3100E series is part of Microchip’s PCIe Gen 3 SAS-3/SATA SmartRAID 3100 adapter family. The new SmartRAID 3100E adapters are suited for systems that require application acceleration from caching support and entry-level enterprise RAID data protection without the cost of cache protection or advanced RAID levels of full-featured RAID adapters, said Microchip. These adapters can be used in applications such as computing and graphical applications, edge compute and storage nodes, and industrial and manufacturing servers.

Serving as a migration path from software RAID solutions or legacy entry-level hardware RAID solutions to Microchip’s Smart Storage stack, the adapters offer a built-in DRAM cache of 1 or 2 GB, providing significant performance acceleration and lower power over previous generations, and are ideal for 4K random read/write workloads, said Andrew Dieckmann, associate vice president of Microchip’s Data Center Solutions business unit.

The SmartRAID 3100E adapters share the common Smart Storage deployment tools such as the Adaptec maxView Storage Manager and the new open-source, software-defined storage plug-ins. Public firmware, software, and documentation are available at https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/. A dedicated Adaptec knowledge base is also available at ask.adaptec.com .

Adaptec SmartRAID 3100E series board-level adapters are available in volume production via Microchip and its authorized distributors . Two new devices, the 3102E-8i and 3101E-4i, supporting hardware RAID levels 0, 1, and 10, support up to eight and four direct attach devices, respectively.