Microchip Technology recently 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 aim is to better support the cloud, enterprise, and workstation customers that require the reliability and performance of hardware RAID at an entry-level cost point.

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.

“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,” said Andrew Dieckmann, associate VP of Microchip’s Data Center Solutions business unit. “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 adaptec.com/support.