LSI Logic this week announced a new pricing and product strategy to help the company penetrate the Serial ATA (SATA)-oriented channel market with its Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) products. LSI Logic has reduced prices on its internal-connect MegaRAID SAS adapters by 20% to 25% and has also debuted a line of SAS adapters designed for low-end server and workstation environments. The new strategy is designed to deliver SAS technology along with sales, support, and marketing resources to the channel.
“We’re not changing what we’re doing with our tier-one OEMs and other SAS customers, [but] the channel space is more SATA-centric so we need to be more aggressive if we want to shake up that market,” says Tom Kodet, acting worldwide channel manager at LSI.
SAS technology enables server-storage integrators and resellers to use both SAS and SATA drives in their storage environments. However, only LSI’s 4-port, 8-port, and 16-port internal adapters have SATA-only competitors, so those are the products that will be repositioned to gain market share from SATA-focused vendors. LSI hopes to attract buyers by eliminating the price barrier for SAS.
Besides making SAS more affordable on its higher-end adapters, LSI has added the 8200 series of adapters, which are entry-level SAS/SATA controllers for cost-sensitive applications. The new adapters are based on LSI’s SAS integrated circuit (IC) technology and provide RAID-5 solutions for low-end and midrange workstation and server environments that require the high performance and reliability of SAS.
The new line consists of the 4-port MegaRAID SAS 8204 and 8-port MegaRAID SAS 8208 adapters. Both adapters are available in PCI-X and PCI-Express models and support RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10.
All of LSI’s adapters are managed by the MegaRAID Management Suite of software, which includes online RAID utilities and SAS topology views from the host, controller, disk enclosure and drive levels.
The 8200 line of MegaRAID adapters will start shipping in March. Pricing for the MegaRAID SAS 8204 and 8208 will be $229 and $315, respectively.