Microchip introduces Adaptec SmartRAID 3100E RAID adapter

Microchip Technology has announced the Adaptec SmartRAID 3100E RAID adapters which are designed to provide reliable hardware RAID protection for customer data in cost-sensitive end applications. The SmartRAID 3100E provides over 60 percent performance acceleration over Microchip’s prior-generation Adaptec Series 8E products at 40 percent power savings.  The Adaptec SmartRAID 3100E series joins Microchip’s existing production-released family of PCIe Gen 3 SAS-3/SATA SmartRAID 3100 adapters. The new SmartRAID 3100E adapters are ideal for systems desiring 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.

Andrew Dieckmann, associate vice president of Microchip’s Data Center Solutions business unit, comments, “The SmartRAID 3100E entry-level adapters offer a migration path for those seeking to transition from software RAID solutions or a legacy entry-level hardware RAID solution to Microchip’s proven Smart Storage stack. These 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.”

Entry-level SmartRAID 3100E RAID adapters are well suited for applications such as computing and graphical applications, edge compute and storage nodes, and industrial and manufacturing servers. Enterprises and cloud service providers now have the option to update the popular Adaptec Series 6E and Series 8E RAID adapters to the Smart Storage platform for these applications and benefit from the unified drivers, firmware and management tools across the Smart Storage family.

Deployment Tools

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 www.adaptec.com/support. A dedicated Adaptec knowledge base is also available at ask.adaptec.com.

Availability

Adaptec SmartRAID 3100E series board-level adapters are available in volume production quantities now. Two new devices, the 3102E-8i and 3101E-4i, supporting hardware RAID levels 0, 1 and 10, provide data reliability and performance acceleration for up to eight and four direct attach devices, respectively.