Microsemi Widens The Range Of Its Storage Adapter Solutions To Include Support for maxCrypto Secure Encryption and On-board Cache Protection

Microsemi Corporation, a Microchip Technology Inc. subsidiary, recently came up with two new additions to its recently introduced lineup of Adapter Smart Storage 12Gbps SAS/SATA adapters. The two new additions are known as – SmartRAID 3162-8i and SmartRAID 3162-8i/e. The first one, the SmartRAID 3162-8i offers industry’s best integration level by providing an integrated supercapacitor directly over the adapter to support write cache data protection. The second one, SmartRAID 3162-8i/e presents one of the first general market 12 Gbps SAS/SATA Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) adapter with maxCrypto™, a line rate controller based encryption solution that provides superior security and much better flexibility as compared to disk-based encryption solutions.

Fig.1: SmartRAID 3162-8i Smart Storage Adapters

(Image Source: Microsemi)

As Andrew Dieckmann, the vice president of marketing for Microsemi’s data center solutions, puts it, “Flexibility, ease-of-use and security continue to be top priorities for our customers. Our new SmartRAID 3162-8i ensures enterprise-level data availability in a highly integrated standard adapter form factor, providing all the required cache protection hardware directly on-board. Our turnkey maxCrypto encryption solution provides superior flexibility and security compared to the most common alternative solution, self-encrypting drives (SEDs), all within the easy-to-use Adaptec management tool suite.”

Now let’s learn a little more about the two solutions. The SmartRAID 3162-8i data will now be able to deploy a usually available RAID adapter with complete cache backup solution within one profile MD2 PCI Express Gen 3 server slot. RAID caching is mostly utilized in enterprise storage for better input/output performance by stating data to controller’s cache prior it gets written over disk. The SmartRAID 3162-8i/e, on the other hand, works for data-at-rest encryption serves the need for multiple markets. This becomes important in wake of the government legislation that mandated data security as well as privacy.